The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About

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Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Russ Fradin sold his first company for $300M. He’s back in the arena with Larridin, helping companies measure just how successful their AI actually is. In this episode, Russ sits down with a16z General Partner Alex Rampell to reveal why the measurement infrastructure that unlocked internet advertising's trillion-dollar boom is exactly what's missing from AI, why your most productive employees are hiding their AI usage from management, and the uncomfortable truth that companies desperately buying AI tools have no idea whether anyone's actually using them. The same playbook that built comScore into a billion-dollar measurement empire now determines which AI companies survive the coming shakeout.

Transcript

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0:00.0	85% of the companies we talked to said they really believe they only have the next 18 months to either become a leader or fall behind. You know, we have our little group chat where we have another friend who's like, oh, all this stuff is overhyped and it's going to zero. Totally wrong. Every time I use AI, it's amazing. There's somebody at every big company who has figured out I could do something in one minute that used to take eight hours. a 28-year-old guy who was using chat GPT really, really well, and they had him create a 30-slide
0:26.0	debt. And they did a global call for everyone in the investment bank for this guy to spend an
0:30.8	hour walking people through how to use chat TV. But that's absurd. That's an absurd way to hope people
0:35.9	adopt world-changing technology.
0:37.5	Cursors are taking mediocre engineers and made them good, but it's taking amazing engineers and made them gods. I report me, I go in for my other four metrics. I have some report of how are we doing EPSO's report. And on AI, all I have is the amount of stuff we bought. When a measure becomes a target, it is no longer accurate as a measure. even though we thought we had our quota said and we thought everyone was productive.
0:56.7	It turned out we thought we had our quota said and we thought everyone was productive,
0:56.7	it turned out we thought we were productive and actually it turned out we could be much more productive.
1:00.5	But compared to what?
1:03.4	Companies are spending $700 billion on AI this year.
1:06.7	Most know there's waste, but don't know how much.
1:09.2	And with AI budgets continuing to grow, this is no longer any old measurement problem.
1:13.7	It's the measurement problem.
1:15.5	The one that will determine whether AI becomes the productivity revolution we are promised
1:19.5	are the most expensive placebo in corporate history.
1:23.1	Russ Freidon saw this movie once.
1:25.1	He was the first employee at the first online ad network in 1996,
1:29.3	when companies were pouring money into digital advertising with no clue if it worked. The industry
1:34.0	didn't take off because the ads got better. It took off because companies like ComScore
1:38.2	built a boring infrastructure to prove the ads worked at all. Now he's building Laredin to do the
1:43.5	same thing for AI.
1:44.9	Not to sell you more AI tools, to tell you if the ones you bought actually do anything.
1:49.5	The stakes are higher this time.
	...

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