Hedgineer's annualized AI bill has grown past $1M, which brought back up a long-running internal discussion at the company: how do you measure ROI on a token? Michael and Jhanvi work through both layers of the problem. The first is instilling good AI hygiene practices across the company — encouraging thoughtful model selection, session discipline, keeping irrelevant context out of the window to optimize on cost. The second is harder. Tag every session to the feature, product, or service it produced, and the company starts to look like a portfolio of assets, each with a cash flow you can discount, price, and reallocate capital against. Running a business through the lens of AI turns every operator into an asset manager.
The complication is that building a product has never been cheaper and building a good product has never been harder. Everyone can prototype now, so the constraint moved from execution to taste, and killing good ideas in favor of great ones grows more challenging. They also get into why an observability layer and a skill library are worth more together than either is alone, and why some AI products are immediately understood and then never used.
About Hedgineer
Hedgineer is building the AI platform for institutional investing — deploying agents, skills, and data connectors directly inside hedge funds and asset managers to transform investment and operational workflows.
The Hedgineer Podcast follows CEO Michael Watson and COO Jhanvi Virani as they navigate the frontier of AI adoption in finance, sharing unfiltered perspectives from the teams, guests, and problems they work with every day.
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