Measuring the costs, utilization, proficiency and impact of AI - with Russ Fradin, Founder and CEO, Larridin

Most enterprises have deployed AI broadly. Far fewer know what they are actually getting from it. Russ Fradin, Co-Founder and CEO of Larridin, has spent his career building measurement infrastructure at inflection points in technology adoption, from early days at ComScore measuring internet advertising to founding Larridin with backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Google's Gradient fund. In this episode, Russ makes the case that AI spend is on a trajectory to become the number-one or number-two driver of enterprise OpEx, and that most organizations still lack the basic visibility needed to manage it.Topics covered:The AI visibility gap: Why AI adoption moved faster than measurement infrastructure, and why enterprises are only now scrambling to answer fundamental questions about what they are spending, where, and by whomUtilization vs. proficiency vs. business impact :Why these three dimensions require separate measurement, and why the 1,800 heavy users at a 30,000-person company are not a success story on their ownToken spend as a new category of OpEx risk: How consumption-based pricing turns every employee into a cost endpoint, with real examples of runaway agent spend and blown budgets that no one turned offCFO ownership of AI investment: Why AI spend is the first technology cost category large enough to pull the CFO into governance conversations that historically belonged to the CIO and department headsChange management as the bottleneck: Why the hard work is not experimentation but operationalizing what works, scaling proven behaviors from the top 5% of users to the full organizationCareer advice for AI-era professionals: Work harder than the room, achieve deep tool mastery, and invest in relationships, the same fundamentals that applied before AI, now with higher stakes for the people who act on themRuss closes with a memorable framing: "Companies have committed to a fitness journey but have not yet bought a scale; Larridin is building that scale."See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.