Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For a long time, talking about Digital Employee Experience (DEX) inside the company was almost synonymous with “making the computer faster” or “reducing support tickets.” Today, that view is limited. Digital Employee Experience is now treated as a direct lever for productivity, talent retention, and business results—not just as an operational IT concern.

Sizing infrastructure has always required a balance between performance, capacity, and risk. What has changed is the level of precision required to make those decisions. Hardware timelines are less predictable. Costs are under closer review. Decisions that were once routine now require clear justification. In many cases, the question is no longer just how much capacity is needed, but whether that capacity can be delivered when it is needed and whether the investment will hold up under scrutiny.

Something unusual happened in the first half of 2026: the most productive AI coding tool on the market became the most financially dangerous. And the companies that discovered this the hard way read like a Fortune 50 roll call.

Your engineers run Claude Code. Your designers are in Cowork. Half the company has Claude open in a browser tab, and a few are on Cursor. It’s on their laptops, each person authenticated a different way, and none of it touches your gateway. The only record you get is one lump-sum bill at the end of the month. Now you can capture it where it happens – on the laptop.

This edition of the Pulse is shifting lanes. We’re calling it the AI Economics Pulse now, because the question on every finance leader’s mind is whether AI spend and the returns on it can be made to pair at all. That question came to a head over the last few weeks. The bills came due, and they came due in public. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months and capped employee spending on Claude Code and Cursor at $1,500 a month.

AI changed how code gets written before it changed how code gets operated. Generation accelerated; the downstream controls that turn that output into reliable, secure software at a reasonable cost did not keep pace. The result is elevated risk, distributed unevenly across engineering organizations. A recent survey explains why the distribution is so uneven.