Return on AI: Escaping the "POC Graveyard" & Measuring Real Business Value with Lakshman Kaveti

🚀 Welcome to a Special Interview Edition of AI Unraveled.

In this episode, we move beyond the hype of "Vibe Revenue" and get down to the bottom line. Host Etienne Noumen sits down with enterprise AI strategist Lakshman Kaveti to answer the question every CEO is asking: "Where is the ROI on my $10 million AI budget?"

Lakshman shares his playbook for moving AI from the "Proof of Concept (POC) Graveyard" to production-grade systems that deliver measurable financial impact. We discuss why accuracy is a vanity metric if it doesn't drive revenue, how to budget for the volatile cost of compute, and why the "Human-in-the-Loop" is actually your biggest ROI multiplier.

Listen at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/return-on-ai-escaping-the-poc-graveyard-measuring/id1684415169?i=1000744110513

Strategic Pillars & Key Topics:

📉 Defining "Return on AI"

• Beyond Cost Savings: Why the old metrics don't work when compute costs are skyrocketing.
• The Financial Framework: How C-suites are justifying massive infrastructure spend by tracking "time-to-value" and strategic advantage rather than just efficiency.

⚰️ Killing the POC Graveyard

• The Transition: Why successful pilots fail in production and the two non-negotiable financial metrics you need to track to prevent it.
• Auditability: How to audit an LLM agent to prove it is generating value, not just text.

⚡ Unlocking Productivity

• The 10x Myth: Why AI isn't replacing jobs but amplifying them. Lakshman shares examples of "Human-in-the-Loop" workflows where the human auditor drives the ROI.
• Vertical vs. Horizontal: Where the real gains are happening—is it R&D or Customer Support?

🛡️ Governance as ROI

• Risk Mitigation: Why spending on auditable architectures (like RAG) offers a better long-term ROI than opaque fine-tuning.
• Future-Proofing: Should you build proprietary data moats or rent off-the-shelf agents?

Watch the full interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/g3AEuy8vDOE

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Credits: This podcast is created and produced by Etienne Noumen, Senior Software Engineer and passionate Soccer dad from Canada.