AI spend rarely arrives as a proposal. A team adopts a tool, it works, and a quarter later there’s a line item nobody formally approved, with a board asking what the spend is producing. This happened at CloudZero: Customer Success AI spend tripled in a quarter, unfettered because we couldn’t predict the outcomes without running the experiment. Now the team wants to double down, and finance has to buy two propositions: that AI drove the results, and that more spend will drive even bigger outcomes.
SVP of Customer Success Matt Katz walks through the double-down case and the outcomes he’s signing up to deliver. CPO Scott Castle shows the product proof underneath it: how CloudZero’s data gives each step a number finance can check.
CloudZero shows you where every AI dollar is going, attributes that spend to the outcomes that define your business, and pinpoints exactly which investments can deliver the most ROI.
You’ll leave able to answer:
- What a dollar of AI spend is actually producing, and how to size it honestly when the number isn’t clean.
- How to know AI drove the result, and not just a good quarter.
- When to rebalance people vs. tooling, and the signals that say more AI spend has stopped helping.
- What the data behind a real “spend more on AI” decision looks like, and why finance found it defensible.
If you own an AI budget, this session shows you how finance will evaluate your next request.
