A New Metric in an IPO Filing Anthropic’s S-1 includes a chart I didn’t expect to see in an IPO filing. It’s titled “Significant increase in revenue per dollar of compute.” I had a big smile on my face. The math is simple. Divide each quarter’s revenue by that quarter’s compute and infrastructure expense. Anthropic’s […]
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI vs. Anthropic: What the S-1 Tells Us About AI ARR
In October 2026, the headlines said Anthropic had passed OpenAI in revenue. Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported that Anthropic’s annualized revenue crossed $65 billion in July. OpenAI reportedly told investors its annualized revenue for September was almost $50 billion, below the figure approaching $70 billion it had signaled earlier. Keep in mind these are press […]
How to Structure Your SaaS Chart of Accounts for AI Revenue and Costs
On the surface, the traditional SaaS P&L looks as clean and predictable as it did five years ago. You have recurring subscription revenue, your cost of goods sold (COGS) is represented properly, and your operating expenses (OpEx) are categorized as R&D, S&M, and G&A. But underneath the hood, AI is completely changing the financial rules. […]
AI Spend Management for CFOs: A 2027 Budget Framework
AI spend is becoming a real finance problem. Price check, please. For the last couple of years, most companies could treat AI as experimentation. Let’s max out on tokens! Employees signed up for ChatGPT or Claude, engineering teams started using AI coding tools, and AI capabilities appeared inside existing software tools. The dollars were often […]
AI COGS Is Now an Earnings Risk
In one week, August 4 to 7, 2026, two software companies told investors the same story from opposite ends of the AI COGS spectrum. Canva cut its full-year 2026 growth forecast from 30% to 20% and said that the cost of serving an AI task had gotten too high. Love the honesty, Canva. Wix said […]
What Cisco’s AI Finance Playbook Means for SaaS CFOs
Cisco’s CFO told Fortune that AI now produces 80% to 90% of the first draft of the company’s MD&A, the mandatory narrative section in every public company’s SEC filing. That is a striking number from a Fortune 500 company with a revenue base above $60 billion. It is also easy to misread. The AI writes […]
How to Calculate Compute-adjusted LTV
The SaaS world already has a lot of metrics, and most companies are still working hard just to calculate the core metrics correctly. But AI is changing the cost structure underneath SaaS unit economics. Traditional software LTV assumes that gross margin is reasonably stable across your ENTIRE customer base. That assumption breaks when customers pay […]
What Your MRR Schedule Isn’t Telling You
Most SaaS companies already have the data they need to understand their revenue base. It’s sitting in their billing system, invoice exports, MRR schedules, CRM, and financial statements. The problem is not always more data. The problem is structure and data coordination. For years, we have used customer revenue data to build MRR schedules, ARR […]
What Should Be Included in AI COGS
If you’ve added AI features to your SaaS product in the last 18 months, your gross margin probably looks different than it used to. Maybe you haven’t noticed because you haven’t mapped AI costs to COGS. Or maybe you have, and you’re trying to figure out what’s normal. Either way, you need a framework. My […]
The Four Layers of AI Measurement: A CFO’s Framework
AI agents are doing real work now. They are resolving support tickets, updating CRM records, drafting journal entries, reviewing contracts, and shipping code. The inference bills are growing. Productivity gains are improving. The org chart mix is shifting to digital labor. But most SaaS and AI companies still cannot report the work their AI is […]