Dealing with AI's Cost Problem without Sacrificing Innovation
AI adoption is accelerating, but the economics are starting to strain. This week, one company (rumored to be Amazon AWS) spent half a billion on AI in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude for employees. This is an extreme cause, but the sentiment remains. Organizations are swinging from tokenmaxxing to AI efficiency. Sunita can connect what is happening at the infrastructure level to what enterprises are doing in practice including early moves toward on-prem deployments and more selective use of AI in production. She'll share examples she is seeing of where companies are successfully scaling back AI spend while still using AI to add value.
About the AI-Native Enterprises Track
AI-Native Enterprises sessions at AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco.
When
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
2:25 PM - 2:45 PM·20m
Where
Leadership 1 · Room 3016
Capacity: 550 attendees
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Speaker
Sunita Verma
Chief Technology Officer
Ironclad
Sunita Verma is the Chief Technology Officer at Ironclad, the AI contracting company accelerating business with every contract. Sunita is a transformative and inspirational technology leader with deep experience in AI/ML, Large Language Models (LLMs), distributed systems, and data technologies. Sunita is a long-time Google veteran. She most recently served as CTO of Character AI where she led innovation in multimodal AI, launching AvatarFX, a tool to create realistic, animated talking videos from a single image and audio clip. Prior to Character, she was VP and GM of Google’s Core Labs. In her role, she was responsible for driving innovation across engineering and product for new platforms and product experiences that incorporated generative AI and LLMs. She also served as the head of Ads Quality for Google’s Search & Shopping Ads business, where she initiated and launched a suite of category-defining advertiser experiences including Responsive Search Ads (RSA). Additionally, Sunita worked across Google’s Payments and Distributed Infrastructure teams, working across a wide range of Google’s leading consumer and enterprise products such as G+, Large scale Distributed Storage systems, Distributed Telemetry system called Census which was open sourced as OpenCensus (https://opencensus.io/).