On Tuesday 29th September 2026, we hosted a roundtable at The Ochre Brasserie, London where we discussed The AI Value Gap: What’s working, what is noise and how to tell the difference.
Fantastic to have a room full of technology leaders from across sectors joining our first Capacitas AI Value Roundtable, hosted by our Service Design Director, Thomas Barns. Thank you to all our guests for such great engagement and exchanging valuable ideas. The clearest signal from the room: the AI conversation has moved on. It used to be about data readiness. Now it is about scaling value and controlling cost.
A few things that stood out
- Engineering carries the biggest AI spend, ahead of product analytics and AI in customer-facing products. That is where the value challenge sits.
- Most AI investment is serving existing goals rather than new ones. Organisations are using it to cut the cost and time of delivering revenue growth, not primarily to open new markets or products.
- Throughput metrics don't prove value on their own. Revenue delivered per unit of engineering spend, and lower tooling cost, make the case concrete.
- Proving ROI is still the gap. Three in four enterprises can't confidently show their CFO the business outcome of their AI investment (State of Tokenomics 2026, 472 organisations, $4.6 trillion in combined revenue). Tellingly, when that same report asked what enterprises want from AI providers, only 4% asked for cheaper pricing. The largest request, at 23%, was for more transparency and granular usage data: a bill they can explain.
- Security, regulation, and governance are holding adoption back as much as cost is.
- Faster engineering does not automatically mean more value. Skills, mental load, and the flow of product ideas all cap what extra speed can actually deliver.
None of this is a pricing problem. It is a clarity problem, and it's solvable. This is the first in a series of Roundtables we will be running. If you would like an invite to the next one, or have a topic you would want the room to discuss please email us at marketing@capacitas.co.uk
Source: State of Tokenomics 2026, Tokenomics Foundation.
