Claude Code’s creator offers a better way to measure AI success than token burn

Claude Code’s creator addressed one of the biggest enterprise questions of the day: how companies can track the returns on their AI spend.

Boris Cherny, the maker of Anthropic’s biggest coding tool, outlined a four-step framework for enterprise AI adoption in a series of X posts on Thursday.

In the third step, Cherny talked about measuring returns from AI once employees have adopted it into their workflows. “Once your teams are bought in, how do you track it?

Usage is worth watching (e.g., a dashboard), but it measures activity, not return,” he wrote.

Instead of only measuring AI token burn on a dashboard, he said the better question is whether the company would have spent engineering effort on the task. “If yes, how much and what would it have cost in manual eng-hours?

He went one step further in his next X post, saying that the bigger payoff “comes when fixing and maintaining happens in the background,” and teams can focus on building.

This is when companies can start “doing things that weren’t even in range before,” he added.

This is not the first time Cherny has talked about return on investment from AI spending.

In a recent fireside chat with Scale AI, he said companies are right to think about how much value they’re getting from AI, but returns can take other forms, such as engineers generating code faster.

Cherny’s posts come as the “tokenmaxxing” trend that dominated the AI scene for the first half of the year has now subsided.

Now, companies are evaluating how to get more value for their money.

Executives from Coinbase and Vercel have publicly shared strategies for reducing costs without limiting employees’ AI use, such as using cheaper Chinese models.

AI return on investment is a major topic du jour, with big voices in business weighing in.

On Wednesday, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told CNBC that companies are seeing AI costs “going up rapidly.” “So, of course, we’re all going to be rational about it like any other resource we use,” Dimon said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last week that AI ROI was a hot topic at the Allen & Co.

Sun Valley Conference. “Everyone’s asking what we can do to help reduce spend or increase value,” he said in an interview with CNBC from the Idaho event.