San Francisco, CA, June 24, 2026 –(PR.com)– The FinOps for Data category leader argues AI’s biggest risk isn’t capability — it’s cost no one can account for.
Enterprise AI adoption is outpacing the ability to account for it. Organizations are spending heavily on infrastructure, data, and tokens while struggling to tie any of it to business value. Gartner predicts more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, citing “escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls.”
That gap is the problem Fortified CEO and founder Ben DeBow set out to answer at After Abundance: AI and the New Technical Debt, an invitation-only San Francisco-based Luminary Societies salon held alongside the Databricks Data + AI Summit. His message to a closed room of technology leaders, AI builders, and investors was blunt: the era of throwing infinite resources at technology is over.
“Everything has a cost, from code to data — and the bill has come due,” DeBow said. He expands with, “The blind spot is that no one sees that cost where it actually lives: at the application, the workload, the individual query. Without that granularity, you can’t tie spend to value — and if you can’t tie it to value, you can’t control it.”
DeBow’s thesis is that AI made building easy but did not make accounting easy. “AI is powerful, but it isn’t efficient — it spends more to reach a result that could have cost far less,” he said. Business users now create apps and agents faster than technology teams can support or govern them, producing a structural accountability gap — systems built fast and accounted for late. The fix, he argues, is to treat technology as a value center, not a cost center: map what every layer of the stack costs and returns, account for tech debt and waste as balance-sheet items, and put one named leader in charge of AI accountability.
Independent data backs the case. “Most agentic AI propositions lack significant value or return on investment,” said Anushree Verma, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner — the same accountability gap DeBow argues enterprises must close before they can scale AI responsibly.
The salon paired DeBow with Scott Brinker, the “Godfather of Martech,” for a curated and moderated dialogue hosted by marketing executive and salon founder, Rebecca Kaykas-Wolff, illuminated the economics of AI and included participating attendees from BlackRock, Gartner, Abbott, Palo Alto Networks, Intuit, Morgan Stanley, plus venture capital and FinOps leaders in the room.
About Ben DeBow, Fortified Data, and Fortified
Ben DeBow is the founder of Fortified Data, the database managed-services firm enterprises trust to run their most demanding environments, and of Fortified, the company behind the WISdom platform. Fortified makes the cost and value of technology visible — starting with data, because data is 30 to 40% of the enterprise tech bill and almost no one can tell you what it returns. Fortified pioneered the category: FinOps for data — not monitoring, but cost visibility. DeBow is the author of End of Abundance in Tech. https://www.amazon.com/End-Abundance-Tech-Efficiencies-Business/dp/B0BNSY19CL
Learn more: fortifieddata.com · fortified.com · bendebow.com
Media contact: Janelle Perez — jperez@fortified.com
The Luminary Societies: http://www.luminarysocieties.com
Media contact: Rebecca Kaykas-Wolff – rebecca@theluminarysocieties.com
Fortified · We pioneered FinOps for data · “Everything has a cost — from code to data.”
Source for fact-check: Gartner press release, “Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027,” June 25, 2025. Quote: Anushree Verma, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner. URL: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027
