AI In Production: Show Me the ROI
Show Me the ROI is a weekly podcast for C-suite leaders, managing directors, and PE operating partners who are driving AI adoption in mid-market firms in Central and Eastern Europe. Host Vladimir Cvijanovic analyzes the actual costs and returns of AI adoption, revealing where numbers can be misleading. He is joined by Lola on adoption economics and Zoltan, who scrutinizes claims against decades of ROI hype. New episodes are released every Thursday.
Episodes
Show Me the ROI — Trailer
Every AI initiative gets approved on a promise. Few can prove, months later, that it paid off, in numbers a board will actually sign off on. Show Me the ROI is the weekly show for C-suite leaders and PE operating partners driving AI adoption in CEE mid-market firms, breaking down what AI adoption actually costs, what it returns, and where the numbers get quietly rewritten. Voices in this episode a
Show Me the ROI #001: The AI Reckoning That Went Quiet, and What CEE Already Knows
AI budgets are under real scrutiny, but the reckoning nobody predicted for midyear never arrived, it just got quieter. This episode breaks down why AI costs spike the moment a pilot connects to real workflows, what Bulgaria's Graphwise proved when Oakley Capital bought a majority stake, why Exadel's CDAO says token usage is the wrong success metric, and the market data on why smart buyers skip the
Show Me the ROI #002: The Trillion-Dollar Attribution Gap
Gartner puts 2026 global AI spend at 2.59 trillion dollars, up 47% from last year, and in the same breath forecasts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects get canceled by the end of 2027. This week, Vlad, Lola, and Zoltan trace the connective tissue between those two numbers: why most companies can't attribute AI cost to a specific workflow once pilots hit production, what that looks like once
Show Me the ROI #003: The Trillion-Dollar Question Nobody's CFO Can Answer Yet
Ninety four percent of CEOs plan to keep increasing AI spend this year. Only sixty percent are actually confident it'll pay off. This week Vlad, Lola, and Zoltan dig into why that gap exists: the seventy percent of AI cost that never shows up on an AI line item, the board math that's still built for a world where spend and outcome move in a straight line, and the CEE companies that bought the tool
Show Me the ROI #004: The Correction-Time Number Nobody's Tracking
65% of employees at companies already using AI say they'd roll it back. 42% say they spend more time correcting AI output than the tool is supposed to save them. This week Vlad, Lola, and Zoltan dig into what that gap actually costs, why CEE seed-stage investors are getting priced out of their own market by mega-funds writing checks ten times the usual size, and what Mistral AI's $3.5B round at a
Show Me the ROI #005: The Cost of an Accepted Outcome
OpenAI halved its token prices this week. Anthropic cut its own by 20%. Gartner still expects worldwide AI spend to reach $2.7 trillion in 2026, up 49.5%. Vlad, Lola, and Zoltan work through why the bill keeps growing while the unit price falls, and why Forrester, Greyhound Research, and Roosh co-founder Serhiy Tokarev all point to the same measure: the cost of an accepted outcome. They also dig i
Show Me the ROI: The Contract and the Clock
Reuters reviewed Anthropic's leaked IPO prospectus. The numbers it reported: $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue, an $8.06 billion operating loss, $518 billion in cloud and compute commitments, and two customers at about 12% of revenue each. Anthropic has not commented. Vlad, Lola, and Zoltan work through what that means for any CIO buying frontier models: price protection, notice before a model retires,
Show Me the ROI: Three Cuts, Three Stories About AI
Three large employers cut management in the same week, and each gave AI a different job in the explanation. The FT reports that HSBC plans to cut up to 70% of its UK wealth advisers, although HSBC's own research of about 10,000 investors found only 12% named AI as the biggest factor in their last investment decision. HSBC has not confirmed the figure. UBS, sixth in the Evident AI Index, kept its a
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