I'm thrilled to announce that I've joined Revenium as VP of Customer Success to help organizations grapple with agentic sprawl—the explosive, uncontrolled growth of AI agents, tools, services and infrastructure spreading across enterprises faster than we can measure or govern them.
I’m excited that this work also directly serves my personal mission: empowering us all to control our own agentic corporations for our own economic benefit, not just forking our data and knowledge over to AI services and lining the pockets of a few platform monopolies.
The AI Moment Demands Economic Clarity
After 15+ years working with organizations deploying cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, and every combination of DevSecFinNoAllOps—and nearly three years building a Personal AI movement with Kwaai.ai—I've watched the LLM revolution unfold with that uneasy rollercoaster of excitement, concern, and existential dread.
Turns out, the Luddites weren't wrong. Making great technological shifts requires careful economic and cultural planning. The difference between a good technology outcome and disaster is rarely the technology itself. It's how teams build processes, systems, and relationships around it. A successful technology project of any size always plans for its economic and cultural impact.
I believe transparency, measurement, technological and economic literacy are the only way we meet the promise of the AI moment without getting crushed by it. I'm joining Revenium to help tackle the burning questions of AI Economics with some of the most complex organizations in the world.
The Chaos on the Ground
So what does AI chaos actually look like? It’s a lot like Cloud Chaos, but at least the Services aren't hiding it anymore; it's tokens-in and tokens-out to a bunch of giant stochastic slot machines.
AI Services have convinced us that the promised productivity multipliers directly correlate to % of users that have adopted. They rush out the same half-baked features so they can point fingers at each other when organizations are struggling through their build phase and trying to make sense of what to do with all of these new power tools at their disposal.
API endpoints are distributed everywhere and all tied to a credit card that will charge a fraction of a penny per invocation or other creative usage-based-metric. Tools call other tools with just a chat message. Non-developers develop new tools to do new things. Services integrate with a spiderweb of other services and usage is consumed everywhere—which you'll find out when you get your bills. AI Architects who have managed to keep their sanity do their best to design enterprise adoption patterns like we have with Platform Engineering, but the surface area is every department in the organization, the governance is more social in nature, the barrier to entry is so low that even the interns are skipping over it.
It's already difficult to account for a single agentic thread and its dependencies, much less understand the cascading impact across an entire organization. We often lose the plot from request to outcome—even when we know what the outcome should be.
The burden on teams to adopt and manage this is high. Very few are measuring outcomes of AI transformation, and it may be because they don't know what their definition of outcome looks like, or perhaps they don't want to miss the pressured targets.
All of this high bandwidth, highly emotional communication means we need to take a step back and implement some fresh approaches to systems, processes, governance and control.
Why Revenium
This is why Revenium is building an AI Economic Control System—not just visibility dashboards, but a framework that helps organizations define how teams of agentic-assisted employees develop and deliver value without bleeding margin or losing control.
It's why I'm excited to join their mission to help individuals, companies, and society leverage AI systems in ways that augment our lives, not extract our value.
What I'm Building
As VP of Customer Success, my job is to help organizations answer three questions:
- What is our AI actually costing us?
- Are we getting value?
- How do we scale across global hybrid teams of employees, agents and systems?
These questions are the difference between AI as a competitive advantage and AI as a financial and emotional black hole.
I'll be working directly with early customers and design partners to co-create the AI Economics playbook for the Enterprise. I’ll be learning alongside them as we build systems that deliver accountable outcomes. Together we will build AI Economic models that serve us!
If you're grappling with AI cost visibility, governance, or margin attribution—or just trying to figure out if your AI investments are paying off—let's talk!
Reach out to me at matt@revenium.io.
Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattasmall/
