Market2026-09-08

Jordan Zamir argues that finance teams should stop budgeting AI like traditional software. Zamir is chief executive of Turnstile, a San Francisco software company. He says software spending now scales with the volume of work software performs, not staff numbers. Customer interactions, automated workflows and internal assistants all consume computing capacity. None of that appears in a staffing forecast, so budgets overshoot. He recommends treating experiments like performance marketing campaigns. Trial workflows get separate budgets, fixed review periods and measurable financial goals. Proven workflows then move into the operating budget once the economics are understood. Finance should also check safeguards against runaway spending as usage grows. Zamir says employees should not have to think about model pricing, and routing decisions belong in the technology stack.

What changed

Software budgets were built by mapping employees to licences, so costs grew with headcount.

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