The week in brief — AI's ROI is decided in the contract and the boardroom

Three lessons this week, one thread: AI's value does not come from the model, it comes from the guardrails around it. Zillow lost $881 million in 2021 after letting its home-buying algorithm decide without human limits when the market changed regime. Inference cost, meanwhile, has collapsed — from $20 to $0.07 per million tokens in two years according to Stanford, a 280-fold drop — which condemns fixed-price multi-year contracts. And PwC measures the cost of missing discipline: 56% of 4,454 CEOs surveyed see no measurable financial gain from AI over the past twelve months.

For an SMB or mid-sized company, these three lessons come down to one reflex: before signing any AI project, write into the contract the thresholds beyond which a human takes back control and an annual price review, then require monthly proof in the executive committee of what the project earned or saved.

Source: PwC, "29th Global CEO Survey," January 2026 (4,454 CEOs, 95 countries); Stanford HAI, "AI Index Report 2025," April 2025; Zillow Group, Q4 2021 results, February 10, 2022.