The creator of Claude Code addressed one of the biggest business questions of the moment: how companies can track the returns on their AI spending.

Boris Cherny, the creator of Anthropic’s largest coding tool, outlined a four-step framework for enterprise AI adoption in a series of X posts on Thursday.

In the third step, Cherny talked about measuring the returns of AI once employees have adopted it into their workflows.

“Once your teams are engaged, how do you track it? It’s worth looking at usage (e.g. a dashboard), but measure activity, not return,” he wrote.

Rather than solely measuring the burning of AI tokens on a dashboard, he said the better question is whether the company would have dedicated engineering efforts to the task.

“If so, how much and how much would it have cost in manual engine hours? That’s your return,” Cherny added.

He went a step further in his next This is when companies can start “doing things that weren’t even within our reach before,” he added.

This isn’t the first time Cherny has talked about the ROI of AI spending. In a recent talk with Scale AI, he said companies are right to think about how much value they get from AI, but the returns can take other forms, such as engineers generating code faster.

Cherny’s posts come as the “tokenmaxxing” trend that dominated the AI ​​scene for the first half of the year has already subsided. Now, companies are evaluating how to get more value for their money. Coinbase and Vercel executives have publicly shared strategies to reduce costs without limiting employees’ use of AI, such as using cheaper Chinese models.

Return on investment in AI is a major topic of the day, with big business voices weighing in. On Wednesday, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told CNBC that companies are seeing AI costs “increase rapidly.”

“So of course we’re all going to be rational about it, like any other resource we use,” Dimon said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last week that AI ROI was a hot topic at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference.

“Everyone is wondering what we can do to help reduce expense or increase value,” he said in an interview with CNBC from the Idaho event.