Companies pouring money into artificial intelligence keep asking the same question: is it paying off? OpenAI's chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has an answer about how to judge that — and it isn't "buy the cheapest option."
According to reporting summarized by The Times of India and MSN (via Bing News), Friar is urging businesses that question the return on their AI investments not to rush toward the lowest-priced AI model. Instead, she suggests they buy AI tools that deliver real results.
At the heart of her advice is a proposed way to measure AI's worth. As MSN summarizes it, Friar's metric focuses on the "useful intelligence generated per dollar spent." Rather than fixating on the sticker price of a model, companies should weigh what that spending actually produces.
That means looking past the headline cost. Per MSN, businesses should track real outcomes and the complete cost of adopting AI — not just the price tag on a given tool, but the full picture of what it takes to run and the value it returns.
The framing reflects a broader tension in the current AI boom. Firms have committed enormous sums to the technology, and many are now under pressure to show it was money well spent. Friar's message reframes that debate: a cheaper model that produces little useful work can be a worse deal than a pricier one that delivers.
Why it matters: as businesses everywhere weigh whether their AI spending is worth it, how they measure "worth it" will shape which tools win — and Friar is arguing that value, not cost, should be the yardstick.