You’ve seen the reports. You’ve sat through the board meetings. “The State of AI.” “The Road to ROI.” It feels like we’re all trapped in a giant consulting matrix, waiting for a magical spreadsheet to justify the millions we’re pouring into artificial intelligence. McKinsey tells us the ROI is right around the corner, promising that if we just hire more experts, the numbers will magically appear.
We are drowning in AI ROI reports that prove absolutely nothing, while quietly building the future in the background.
The skeptics are having a field day. They look at the lack of measurable financial returns and cry foul. They see consultants profiting off the hype cycle and call it a cash grab. And honestly? They’re half-right. If you measure the success of AI purely by “productivity gains” or “cost reductions,” you’re going to be disappointed. But that’s because you’re measuring the wrong thing.
The real revolution isn’t happening on a slide deck. It’s happening in your IT department. A massive chunk of organizations—nearly a third—are quietly doing something radical: they’re using agentic coding tools to build software in-house, and actively deciding not to buy off-the-shelf SaaS products.
The real ROI of AI isn’t saving 20% on developer time; it’s firing your SaaS vendors.
Think about what that actually means. For the last twenty years, the business playbook was simple: find a problem, buy a software subscription, integrate it, pray it works. We became buyers. We became dependent on an entire industry of software vendors who held the keys to our digital infrastructure. AI is breaking that monopoly.
If you’re a decision-maker, you need to stop asking your consultants, “When will AI make us more productive?” You need to start asking, “What software do we no longer need to buy?” The competitive advantage isn’t in squeezing a few extra minutes out of your employees’ days. It’s in structural disruption.
When you can prompt your way to a custom-built internal tool, the traditional software industry doesn’t just shrink—it becomes obsolete to you.
The narrative that AI needs a Randomized Controlled Trial to prove its worth is a distraction. Sometimes things are just obvious. The value isn’t in the ROI spreadsheet; it’s in the shift in market power. You are no longer at the mercy of software vendors’ pricing models.
Stop waiting for the consultants to validate your AI strategy with a pretty graph. The real ROI is already here, hiding in plain sight. It’s the death of your software bills. In the age of AI, the ultimate competitive advantage isn’t buying the best software—it’s refusing to buy any at all.
FAQ
Q: But if there's no measurable ROI, isn't this just hype?
A: The ROI is there, you're just looking for it in the wrong place. Stop looking for productivity gains on a timesheet and look at the line item for software purchases. That's where the money is.
Q: What does this mean for my IT budget?
A: It means you should freeze new SaaS acquisitions. Take that budget and invest it in agentic coding tools and internal talent. You're about to become your own software vendor.
Q: So we should just fire all our software vendors today?
A: Not all at once, but start with the tools that are just 'good enough.' If a team can build a custom internal workflow with AI in a week, why pay a vendor $50k a year for a bloated, generic version of the same thing?