Tavakoli: Enterprise token spend is surging without clear ROI for management
Arsalan Tavakoli · The Enterprise AI Reality Check: From Dashboard Graveyards to 30-Day Migrations with Databricks · Jun 24, 2026 · at 3:49
Databricks co-founder Arsalan Tavakoli explains to SaaStr's Jason Lemkin how CEO mandates to use AI have caused token spend to rise without clear ROI.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so now we have this other problem, which is happening where everybody's like, okay, all my employees are token maxing. My spend on tokens is going up, but I have no idea what I'm getting out for it.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Arsalan Tavakoli
Tavakoli: Existing valuable software monopolies will be broken within 24 months
“I think any industry that is highly valuable, that has a monopoly today, Will not have a monopoly, 12 to 24 months from now, because.”
Tavakoli: Text-to-SQL fails in BI without deep semantic data understanding
“I think the hard part for the standalone BI tools was they historically really had no semantic understanding of the data, right?
You didn't extract of a data warehouse.
They stood there.
And when they tried to add talk to data, it was mainly just, let me conve…”
Tavakoli: Voice interfaces will soon replace click-and-drag BI tools
“I think most people naturally believe that interface is going to go to voice, right?
I think it's voice.
And so clicking and dragging and dropping like BI tools, like I clicked here, I did that.
I think that part is going away.”
Tavakoli: "Vibe coding" in-house enterprise applications and CRMs is not realistic
“The notion that I'm going to vibe code my own CRM and I'm going to vibe code all my own applications. I think that that it's just not a reality, right? Even if you could build it, maintaining it, evolving it, liability”