Dallas Dolen, PwC's TMT leader, says enterprise AI spending is shifting from volume to value. The key concept: 'outcome maxing' is replacing 'token maxing,' meaning companies are moving away from measuring AI usage by raw token consumption and toward measuring it by business results delivered. Dolen tracks this every day across major enterprises, which makes his framing more grounded than most analyst takes.
The conversation surfaces two concrete pressure points shaping the market right now. First, agents are hitting real limits inside enterprise environments, with adoption stalling at the edges of what current systems can reliably automate. Second, Dolen believes a price war among AI labs is imminent, which would reshape the ROI calculus for every company currently modeling AI costs.
The audience poll on willingness to pay for AI is worth watching in full, not for the result but for what the distribution reveals about where enterprise buyers actually are versus where vendors assume they are. The gap between those two positions is the story.
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