Deep|LLM: Enterprise AI Adoption Survey (Vol. 6) - In Our Sample: AI Spending Growth Expected to Slow; Routine Work Shifts to Lower-Cost Models
AI spending growth is expected to slow at most companies in this sample. The fintech group’s spending growth is expected to slow after a rapid initial AI rollout. At the pharmaceutical group, better model selection and procurement terms are expected to curb spending growth. Spending growth at the pharmacy and health insurance group is expected to remain broadly steady.
Claude-based workflows can replace specialist software for feature engineering. The subprime auto lender’s in-house workflow lets its team direct the search for variables, require explanations of their business meaning and account for compliance constraints. With that workflow meeting its needs, the lender plans to cancel or not renew a specialist tool costing ~$80K-100K a year.
Matching models to tasks can cut AI spending even as token use rises. After training, some teams at the fintech group roughly halved AI spending while using more tokens. The pharmacy and health insurance group’s expert estimates that better routing and model choice could reduce API costs by 20%-30% for the same workload; its automatic router is still under evaluation.
Some companies tie additional AI funding to expected cost savings, revenue gains or less manual work. The brewing group asks business owners to explain expected cost savings or additional revenue and whether they will commit to changing workflows and reducing headcount after full implementation. At the pharmacy and health insurance group, proposals to scale a use case must explain how it will reduce manual processing, handling time or rework.
Most companies in this sample have not adopted Fable for routine production; one interviewed company reports using Astra for cross-system commercial analysis. Cost, a lack of recurring tasks that justify it, and data-retention terms constrain broader Fable adoption. The mega brewing group uses Astra to combine market strategy, brand plans and financial information with customer-pricing information.
Self-hosted open-weight models already handle about half of API calls at one interviewed company. The pharmaceutical group has incorporated model downloading, scanning, verification and tuning into its internal process. Its expert roughly estimates model-use costs to be ~90% lower than with external APIs. These workloads avoid external per-token charges but still incur internal deployment and operating costs.
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