The Hidden Costs of AI: Why Token Prices Tell Half the Story
The Hidden Costs of AI: Why Token Prices Tell Half the Story  
Podcast: AI Proving Ground Podcast: Exploring Artificial Intelligence & Enterprise AI with World Wide Technology
Published On: Wed Nov 11 2026
Description: Nearly 75% of AI leaders have little or no confidence they can demonstrate AI's value to a CFO. As enterprise AI spending accelerates, the pressure to prove a return is growing, and the token bill tells only part of the story.Brian Feldt is joined by J.R. Storment, executive director of the Tokenomics Foundation, and Jack French, who leads Applied AI at World Wide Technology, to examine why organizations are struggling to connect AI costs to measurable business outcomes.They explore the hidden costs of AI, from infrastructure and data preparation to governance and the growing operational demands of AI agents. The conversation also tackles the shift toward open-weight models, why enterprises are adopting hybrid AI strategies, and how FinOps principles can help organizations better understand spending without stifling innovation.As AI becomes a bigger part of enterprise operations, the question is no longer how much AI an organization can deploy, but whether it can demonstrate what that investment is actually delivering.Topics include: AI ROI, tokenomics, total cost of AI, AI FinOps, agentic AI economics, open-weight models, hybrid AI infrastructure, cost attribution, and business accountability.Support for this episode provided by: ProofpointMore about this week's guests:J.R. Storment is the General Manager of Technology Value Umbrella at the Linux Foundation, where he leads vendor-neutral standards and community projects, including the Tokenomics Foundation, the FinOps Foundation, ITAM Forum, and the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS). He is co-author of the O'Reilly's FinOps books and was previously co-founder of Cloudability, from 2011 until its 2019 acquisition by Apptio, where he served as GM of Cloud and VP of Product until 2020, ahead of the IBM acquisition.Jack French brings a depth of experience in AI and Cloud technologies to WWT. As the AVP of the Cloud Global Solutions and Architecture team, his responsibilities include leading the the Applied AI team, which is responsible for Workforce AI, AI Native Engineering, AI Economics / Tokenomics, Data Platforms, and AI Agentic Operations.The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.