AI spending is climbing fast. But the number itself may be less important than what it reveals about how an organization is actually using AI.

WWT CFO Tom Strunk and CIO Kevin Dana are watching that shift firsthand. As token consumption moves from thousands to millions, the spend becomes a signal: where people are experimenting, which use cases are gaining traction and where it may be worth looking more closely for value.

They also get into a challenge traditional IT budgets weren't built for. AI usage can scale quickly and unpredictably, making transparency between finance and technology critical. The goal isn't simply to control the cost. It's to understand what's driving it, where it's creating value and how the business can make smarter decisions as adoption grows.

Support for this episode provided by: Snowflake

More about this week's guests:

Tom Strunk is Chief Financial Officer and Chief Data Officer at World Wide Technology, where he helps shape the company’s financial, data and investment strategy. Since joining WWT as its 21st employee in 1994, he has helped guide its growth into a global technology solutions provider. Tom brings a CFO’s perspective to AI investment, rising consumption and the challenge of connecting AI spend to real business value.

Kevin Dana is Senior Vice President of IT and Cybersecurity and CIO at World Wide Technology, where he leads the company’s technology strategy and digital transformation efforts. With more than 28 years of IT experience, Kevin focuses on using technology to drive meaningful business outcomes. He brings a CIO’s perspective to AI adoption, rapidly growing token consumption and what AI spend can reveal about usage, opportunity and business value.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.