From Token Chaos to Engineering ROI - Turning AI Spend into Org. Capability

Token usage is exploding. Engineering budgets aren’t.
As AI moves from experimentation into everyday software development, organizations are confronting a new economics of engineering: rapidly increasing token consumption, unpredictable costs, and early productivity gains that can be diluted by churn and rework.
Join Jed Yueh, Founder of Antenna, Delphix, and Avamar, and bestselling author of Disrupt or Die, for a practical discussion about what is actually working as AI moves from experimentation to scale.

In this session, Jed will explore a provocative shift underway in technology: the collapse of traditional R&D organizations and the rise of autonomous software creation systems.

We’ll dig into the real trade-offs:

• Where token spend is going and why it’s accelerating
• The hidden drivers of AI churn, including context bloat, blocked workflows, and rework loops
• How leading teams are measuring real output versus AI noise
• Where AI is adding true engineering capacity versus simply creating more activity
• The headcount versus AI capacity equation, and how to defend it to the board

As AI reshapes how software is created, the conversation is moving beyond experimentation and adoption to something more fundamental:

What does engineering ROI look like when software creation itself becomes increasingly autonomous?
This session is designed for leaders in engineering, technology, product, R&D, and AI transformation.

Speaker Bio
Jedidiah Yueh is an accidental entrepreneur and the bestselling author of Disrupt or Die, a book that refutes conventional ideas on innovation with proven frameworks from Silicon Valley. He was the founding CEO of Avamar, which transformed the data backup industry and was acquired by EMC in 2006 for $165 million, later generating more than $5 billion in cumulative sales. He then founded Delphix, whose DevOps data platform served more than 30% of the Global 100 and surpassed $1 billion in cumulative sales. In 2013, the San Francisco Business Times named Jed CEO of the Year. Delphix was acquired by Perforce in 2024 after scaling to $200 million and achieving profitability. More recently, Jed founded SustainableIT.org, a nonprofit focused on advancing global sustainability through technology leadership.