Panel
Cracking the ROI Code: Is Intelligence Meeting the Income Statement? | RAISE Summit 2026
- Dynatrace and Rider anticipate that establishing trust in system outcomes is a prerequisite for faster production deployment, enabling autonomous operations where deterministic AI acts without manual intervention and delivering "zero cases" where issues are resolved before human contact.
- ServiceNow projects a $500 million P&L improvement from AI-driven asset enhancements this year, driven by embedded AI that boosts productivity, top-line growth, and product innovation while maintaining better margins, with a strategy to avoid "token maxing" by selecting efficient models via internal algorithms rather than allowing indiscriminate experimentation.
- Rider expects an average 350% ROI for its customers through scalable autonomy, predicting that hundreds of millions in deposits will be gained by regulated firms using autonomous agents, while noting that enterprises lacking AI product managers and engineers will struggle with agent productivity due to model drift and insufficient guardrails.
- Vanta warns that 70% of enterprises will face shadow AI risks from unsanctioned usage, with new customers uncovering an average of 140 unknown AI tools, and predicts that without connected data systems, companies will struggle to achieve ROI or see increased token spend without returns due to operating in "single player mode."
- FedEx plans to consolidate 100% of data for AI feeding by the end of 2027 and rewrite 50% of workflows with embedded AI by 2028, alongside reskilling its 500,000-plus workforce through a program launched December 1, 2025, to measure impact via efficiency in functions, improved customer experience, and new revenue channels from DataWorks.
- Industry participants foresee a massive shift in labor needs, with Rider predicting a 300% increase in functional engineering roles over the last three months, the creation of new job categories like legal and marketing engineers, and a belief that only 4% to 7% of trained individuals will become "change makers," while ServiceNow and FedEx emphasize that firms failing to retrain their people will not survive.
- ServiceNow and Vanta highlight the necessity of new control mechanisms and business observability metrics beyond traditional uptime, with ServiceNow developing abstraction layers to make models interchangeable parts of a stack that converge within 5% to 7% of each other in results over time.
- Mei expresses skepticism regarding immediate financial gains, stating that meaningful ROI is likely several years away and will not be discussed again in earnest until the following year.
- Rider anticipates that the most critical corporate data will future-generated from agent interactions, with memory layers becoming proactive to push insights to users, while ServiceNow expects innovation speeds to create FOMO leading to ineffective tool adoption unless customers leverage abstraction layers to avoid experimenting with different models.