The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - The AI ROI Surprise: Wharton Finds 75% of Enterprises Seeing Positive ROI from AI
Episode Date: November 8, 2025A major new study from Wharton finds that three out of four enterprises are already getting positive ROI from their AI investments — a far cry from the doom-and-gloom narratives of failed adoption. ...NLW breaks down the findings: how GenAI has moved from curiosity to core workflow, what use cases are driving measurable returns, and why 2026 may be the year of “performance at scale.” Plus: the latest on Anthropic’s $70B forecast, Michael Burry’s AI short, and Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity.Brought to you by:KPMG – Discover how AI is transforming possibility into reality. Tune into the new KPMG 'You Can with AI' podcast and unlock insights that will inform smarter decisions inside your enterprise. Listen now and start shaping your future with every episode. https://www.kpmg.us/AIpodcastsRovo - Unleash the potential of your team with AI-powered Search, Chat and Agents - https://rovo.com/AssemblyAI - The best way to build Voice AI apps - https://www.assemblyai.com/briefBlitzy.com - Go to https://blitzy.com/ to build enterprise software in days, not months Robots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results https://robotsandpencils.com/The Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Interested in sponsoring the show? sponsors@aidailybrief.ai
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, three quarters of enterprises are already seeing a positive
ROI from AI investment.
And before that, in the headlines, Anthropic projects profitability on 70 billion in revenue
by 2028.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions
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study, which is live at ROIurvey.a. right now. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition,
all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. A new financial forecast from Anthropic
suggests absolutely unrelenting growth for the leading AI labs. According to reporting from the
information. Anthropic expects to generate $70 billion in revenue and have positive cash flows of $17 billion
in 2028. Now, last month, Reuters reported that Anthropic was on pace for $9 billion in ARR by the end of the year.
That report noted a revenue target between $20 and $26 billion had been set for 2026.
Digging into line items, Anthropic expects API revenue to reach $3.8 billion this year,
more than doubling the $1.8 billion most recently forecasted by OpenAI.
Claude itself is now generating a billion dollars in annualized revenue.
which is more than double its pace from July.
Now, for many, the report is a big validation for Anthropic's strategy of pursuing foundation models,
the application layer, and direct partnerships with enterprise customers all at the same time.
Anthropic assigned a number of large partnerships in recent months,
including org-wide deployments for Deloitte and Cognizant for hundreds of thousands of seats.
On another front, the numbers suggest that Anthropic might have a big fundraising round coming soon.
Their last fundraising was completed in September and valued the company at $170 billion.
Sources suggest the next round would target a valuation between $300,400 billion.
Now, to the extent we can extrapolate this level of growth to the sector in general,
it's certainly a positive sign for AI being a boom rather than a bubble.
OpenAI reported 13 billion in ARR in October,
but Sam Altman recently said the figure is now well more than that.
He hinted that reaching $100 billion in revenue is a realistic forecast for 2027,
shuffling up that timeline substantially.
Besides stratospheric growth, Anthropics numbers also suggest that their business model
has a clear path forward towards probability.
There's been a huge amount of hand-wringing about AI being unprofitable,
But Anthropic disclosed are on pace to reach 50% gross profit margin this year and 77% by 2028.
The company is forecasting 2027 as the year they flip into positive free cash flow for the first time.
Now, given how tied up the performance of these companies is with the broader stock market,
it's worth noting that AI stocks are having a bit of a shaky week as investors pull back on fears of the AI bubble bursting.
Back on Tuesday, AI stocks let a 2% fall in the NASDAQ,
which frankly had so many different causes it's very hard to sort out exactly what the catalyst was.
You could point to ongoing government shutdown, trade uncertainty, or deteriorating conditions in the real economy as driving the move.
At an event on Tuesday, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said,
When you have these cycles, things can run for a period of time.
But there are things that will change sentiment and will create drawdowns or change the perspective on the growth trajectory,
and none of us are smart enough to see them until they actually occur.
Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick had a similar view commenting that we should, quote, welcome the possibility that there would be drawdowns,
10% to 15% drawdowns that are not driven by some sort of macro cliff effect.
Still, many are expecting a macro cliff and a total collapse of AI stocks that mirrors the end of the dot-com bubble,
despite all the evidence of all the ways that it's different.
And while Wednesday saw a stabilization for AI stocks, the balance of risks has clearly shifted.
Andrew Schlossberg, the CEO of Investco said,
there is some point where we will be probably closer to a correction than we are to a 10% or 20% rise up from here.
One of the interesting stock moves this week was Pinterest,
with investors seemingly running out of patience with AI hype.
The stock fell by 21% on Wednesday, after guidance came in weaker than expected.
Pinterest also warned of software ad spending linked to tariffs, yet during the same earnings report,
CEO Bill Reddy said, our investments in AI and product innovation are paying off.
We've become a leader in visual search and have effectively turned our platform into an AI
powered shopping assistant for 600 million consumers.
Continuing the theme we saw with big tech earnings last week, investors seem to no longer
care about claims that AI adoption is paying off. They want to see real ROI falling to the bottom line.
Now, one reason for the fallen sentiment is that Michael Burry is looking for his next big short.
Bury famously made $100 million by shorting housing bonds during the financial crisis and was later depicted by Christian Bail in the film The Big Short.
I've spoken before about how I think that movie itself almost single-handedly made it so a generation of traders would rather call everything a bubble every single time than actually try to engage with the fundamentals.
But here we are.
On Monday night, Bury revealed that his hedge fund's Scion Asset Management is short the AI bubble via a billion dollars in put options on Palantir and Nvidia.
That's roughly 80% of the value of his fund concentrated in those bearish bets.
The disclosure came two weeks ahead of the deadline, so Bury clearly wanted to spark a narrative.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp fanned the discussion in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday morning, saying,
when I hear short sellers attacking what I believe is clearly the most important software company in the world, it's super triggering.
Every time they short us, we are just tripling down on getting better numbers, in part to make them poorer.
The two companies he's shorting are the ones making all the money, which is super weird.
The idea that chips and ontology is what you want to short is bat-sh-shy crazy.
Jensen Huang also pushed back on Burry's position.
speaking with Sky News in the UK, he rejected the idea of an AI bubble saying,
we're a long ways away from that. I really think this is the beginning of the buildout
and we're seeing a platform shift from the traditional way of doing computing to artificial intelligence.
When something is profitable, the suppliers want to make more of it. That's the reason the AI
buildout is accelerating because AI is now so productive, so profitable, and used by so many people.
Now, while many are latching onto Burry's trade as a sure-fire sign the bubble is bursting,
others noted that he isn't always a reliable signal. The short bear posted, I respect Burry,
However, let's remember it took two to three years from the moment he started shorting until the collapse.
It is also worth noting that Bury called for crashes in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2020, 2021, and
23. As Peter Malook pointed out at the beginning of October, the S&P 500 is up 71% and has hit 88 all-time highs since Michael Bury said sell back in 2023.
It's also worth keeping in mind that Bury isn't shorting the market with a billion dollars of his own money.
Investors put their money with Bury's hedge funds specifically because of his reputation for shorting bubble.
The point is he wouldn't be doing his job if he wasn't shorting the likes of Palantir and
NVIDIA at some point.
Still, markets around AI are getting more interesting.
Deutsche Bank is considering shorting AI stocks as a way to hedge their exposure to AI data centers.
The German bank has extended billions of dollars in loans to data center projects with one
executive stating that they've bet big on the theme.
Now, high-level conversations are underway on how the bank can hedge their exposure.
Options include buying default protection on some of the debt using derivatives, called synthetic
risk transfers or SRTs.
they're also reportedly looking to simply short a basket of stocks associated with AI.
Deutsche has primarily lent to hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google,
but they're increasingly going down the stack and lending to smaller neoclouds as well.
Now, part of what this is reflective of is a changing of the phase for the AI buildout.
Until now, AI infrastructure has largely been cash flowed by the hypers,
but the size of the buildout increasingly will require debt financing to continue.
Speaking with the information this week,
BlackRock's global head of tech, Tony Kim, said,
there is no doubt that with the trillions of dollars of CAPEX required for AI, companies will need to
tap into debt markets to fund this expansion. For his part, Kim believes this is a necessity to move
forward, commenting tech companies will have to shed their aversion to leverage. Now, for his part,
Kim thinks that because these companies are so unlevered right now, there's a lot of room to run
with that, but this is certainly something to keep an eye on. We'll close out today with two
stories related to perplexity. First, Snap has signed a huge deal to integrate perplexity
into their platform. The deal will see Perplexity paying $400 million in cash inequity for the ability
to use Snapchat as a distribution channel. A revenue sharing agreement will kick in next year.
While Snapchat might be behind TikTok and Instagram, it still has almost half a billion daily
active users. Perplexity will be integrated into the chat function and according to a press release,
the aim is to deliver clear conversational answers drawn from verifiable sources all within Snapchat.
Snap CEO Evan Speakle said, our goal is to make AI more personal, social, and fun, woven into the
fabric of your friendships, snaps and conversations. Now, Snap, generally speaking, is at a crossroads,
becoming closer to the other social media platforms with features like stories and public content
feeds. They've also made a big push into advertising with ad revenue surging 8% last quarter.
While many wondered if Snap's young audience was a good fit for perplexity, markets like the
deal and snap stock was up 25% and after market trading following the announcement.
In a slightly tougher story for Perplexity, Amazon is suing them over their data scraping practices.
On Tuesday, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in an attempt to block Perplexity's agents from accessing their e-commerce platform.
Amazon reportedly laid out their complaints in a cease and desist last Friday.
They claimed that Perplexity's web crawlers failed to identify themselves as associated with an AI agent.
Perplexity fired back this week in a blog post called Bullying is Not Innovation.
They wrote, for the last 50 years, software has been a tool like a wrench in the hands of the user.
But with the rise of agentic AI, software is also becoming labor, an assistant, an employee, an agent.
The law is clear that large corporations have no right to stop you from owning wrenches.
Today, Amazon announced it does not believe in your right to hire labor to have an assistant
or an employee acting on your behalf. This isn't a reasonable legal position. It's a bully tactic
to scare disruptive companies like perplexity out of making life better for people.
Amazon noted that third-party agents from other companies identify themselves as such,
writing in a response blog post, we think it's fairly straightforward that third-party applications
that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly
and respect service provider decisions whether or not participate.
They took it a little further in their lawsuit, writing,
no different than any other intruder,
perplexity is not allowed to go where it has been expressly told it cannot,
that perplexity's trespass involves code rather than a lockpick, makes it no less unlawful.
Now, the dust-up is interesting, of course,
not as some psychodrama between two tech companies,
but as a preview of a broader fight around agendic shopping.
Multiple labs are preparing to let agents loose on this year's Black Friday sales,
but Amazon, as the largest e-commerce platform,
can currently shut everyone down with the flick of a switch.
So chalk this up as a skirmish in a larger battle.
For now, though, that is going to do it for today's headlines.
Next up, the main episode.
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SDLC from AI assisted to AI Native. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. If you are looking for
a way of understanding where the general sentiment around AI is right now, look no further than the
difference in reception to two studies from Ivy League universities that have come out over the last
six months. We spent a huge portion of this summer and frankly continue to have to deal with
that inane MIT air quote study, if you can even call it that, that interviewed 52 executives
seemingly chosen for convenience of being around and looked at public earning statements
for companies explicitly saying that they were seeing new profitability from their AI initiatives,
all in the way to proclaiming that 95% of AI initiatives were failing. That statistic has been
included in so many analyses and media pieces and blog posts and pitches. It is honestly,
at this point, much to my chagrin, probably the most quoted, most ubiquitous study around AI shared
this year. Meanwhile, a longitudinal study from Wharton on its third year, with a much more
comprehensive and verifiable academic methodology that surveyed around 800 enterprise leaders
across a variety of functions, has gotten barely any attention at all.
Now, ironically, it is probably the case that when it comes to the longevity of AI, it is probably
a net better thing for the industry, that everyone latched on to the skeptical study as opposed
to the optimistic study, because it shows that despite all the bubble screamers, the narrative at
least is very, very far from overheated right now. But in any case, when we move beyond the
meta interpretations of where the AI discourse is, there is still a ton of real, really,
really valuable stuff in this Wharton study that very much deserves a review, and that is what we
are doing today. As I said, this is the third annual Wharton GBK study of Enterprise Gen.
A.I. Adoption, by and large, is of an AI moving mainstream, adoption becoming ubiquitous,
and integrated in the fabric of everyday life, and ROI not only beginning to be measured, but also
showing up. The big theme one, let's call everyday AI, or AI moving from curiosity to core
workflow. The theme is basically that Gen. AI is now part of daily work, not an experiment.
82% of enterprise leaders now use Gen A.I. Weekly. And almost half of decision makers,
46% report using Gen A. Daily. That's up 17 percentage points versus last year.
Knowledge and familiarity with Gen A.I. has risen. 77% report being at least somewhat familiar
with Gen A.I. Although there are slight laggards in marketing and management. We're starting to
see functional adoption patterns where key business tasks are seeing higher Gen A.A.
marketing content creation is up, internal support and help desk is up, document and meeting
summarization is up, presentation and report creation is up, idea generation and brainstorming is up,
data analysis and analytics are up, and while there are lots of different benefits of AI,
half of the top 10 Gen AI use cases directly boost employee productivity.
Top 10 use cases in 2025 are in order, data analysis and analytics, document and meeting
summarization, document and proposal editing and writing, presentation and report creation,
idea generation and brainstorming, marketing content creation, customer service and support,
email generation, internal support and help desk, and sales content creation.
Interestingly, though, AI agents are starting to emerge.
58% of enterprises are testing AI agents, mostly among this cohort for process automation,
analytics, and workflow orchestration. And yet really, the big story of this survey is not
about usage, but about ROI. Enterprises are very clearly shifting from use to proof.
First of all, ROI measurement has become standard. 72% of companies are formally tracking their
Gen. AI ROI. The functions that lead in structured ROI tracking, including HR at 84% and finance
at 80%. Maybe the biggest headliner statistic of the whole report, three-fourths of enterprises
report positive ROI. 74% overall are seeing either moderately positive or significantly positive
of ROI, with smaller firms between 50 and $2 billion in revenue, seeing more ROI so far than
enterprises with $2 billion plus an annual revenue. Now, we have seen over the past couple of months
just a slew of indications that ROI is coming faster than people in many cases would have
thought, and the perception of ROI continues to rise. So what are going to be the big blockers?
Well, as we've seen over and over again, it's going to be more about people than employees.
While 89% of respondents said that AI enhanced skills,
43% still fear skill decline as well.
And while overall, the vast majority of decision makers
are saying they feel more positive about Gen AI over the past year,
they are also still cautious as well.
What all of this sets up very clearly in my mind
is a 2026 where the key theme of the year
is going to be not only about measuring ROI and demonstrating ROI,
but about understanding how it compares.
We're now up over 700 use cases that have been contributed to the AI-R-OI benchmarking study
and getting just a huge degree of granular information around where the benefits are really coming.
Part of why I wanted to launch this study is that I want to start to have benchmarks where organizations can understand,
A, what type of benefit they're supposed to get out of AI,
and B, whether the results that they're seeing are actually commensurate with their peers and colleagues.
On the first part, as much as we talk about AI and productivity, there are actually a variety of different
types of benefits and impact that AI can have. There's time savings, cost savings, new capabilities,
enhanced throughput and output, reduced risk, improved decision making, enhanced revenue,
new revenue lines, and understanding which use cases are relevant for which of those different
types of benefits is really important. Second, because we're all floating in new territory,
we don't need to just know whether AI is improving things, but whether it's improving things
in a way that's commensurate with what we would expect. For example, if a particular
deployment is helping your team increase marketing throughput by 10%. That might seem great
until you find out that for all of your competitors, is increasing marketing output by an average of 20%.
Look, ultimately, the ROI survey is just one very small part of what it's going to be a big theme
for all of next year. But still, if you want access to all the information that we find from that,
go to ROISurvey.aI, contribute, and you will get the results when they are completed towards the end
of this month. Bring it back to Roundup on Wharton, what do they think about what 2020
will bring. The study authors write,
2026 could be the turn from
accountable acceleration to performance at scale,
where today's ROI metrics, playbooks,
and guardrails let enterprises rewire
core workflows, deploy agentic systems,
and reallocate budgets towards proven
returns. They point out that
four out of five see Gen AI investments paying
off in about two to three years.
88% anticipate increasing
Gen AI budgets in the next 12 months, and
everyone is trying to figure out how to make
or get the talent that's required
for this new era. So that is
the story of the Wharton study, optimism, excitement, and ROI coming into focus.
For now, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief.
Appreciate you listening, as always, and until next time, peace.
