The tokenomics of your AI stack + Highlights
$5B in tech deals this week, signals worth watching, plus deeper AI spend visibility.
Hey friend, kinda chic of you to be here! AI’s experimentation era has given way to its prove-its-worth era, where knowing what creates real value helps you decide what to scale, what to rethink, and what isn’t worth the money. That starts with visibility, because when you can see where the money goes, which models perform, and how usage changes over time, it becomes much easier to decide what deserves more investment.
Summary
Read time: 4 min
Highlight Of The Week:
The Tokenomics of AI
Who’s Buying in Tech This Week
$5B changed hands between Bending Spoons, Autodesk, Procore, and more.
Signals
OpenAI is building a $300+ AI speaker with Jony Ive's studio, its first hardware move beyond the screen
Oklo split its first atoms in a Texas test reactor, a milestone for its nuclear technology and a step toward medical isotopes
Google Search Console is expanding beyond websites, letting creators see how their Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube content performs in search
Cloudflare built Kitesurf, a lightweight browser made for AI agents that uses up to 7x less memory than Chromium
What I shipped this week
Deeper AI spend visibility
You can now see model-level spend and token breakdowns for every AI vendor, plus explore how your AI costs change over time in the new spend trend view.
Highlight Of The Week: Tokenomics
Welcome to Tokenomics, where understanding which tasks AI can do is just as important as how much it costs and how it impacts your balance sheet. If you want to understand why AI is so hard to price and where your AI budget is quietly leaking, these two articles are must-reads.
Who's Buying in Tech This Week
Bending Spoons acquires Airtable for $1.285B - its first deal since going public last month, adding a major enterprise software brand to the portfolio.
Autodesk acquires MaintainX for $3.6B - bringing real-world maintenance and operations data into its design-to-operate platform.
Procore acquires DroneDeploy for $845M - pairing construction data with jobsite visual intelligence to build "digital co-workers" that spot problems and act on them.
Okta acquires Permiso for ~$200M - extending identity security beyond login to catch threats from AI agents and machine identities.
AutoRek acquires Grath, terms undisclosed - combining enterprise-grade financial controls with Grath's AI-native reconciliation tech.
OpenAI acquired presentation startup NextSlide, folding its team into ChatGPT to build better AI-generated slides.
AMD is acquiring chip startup Taalas, betting on hardwir.ed silicon to make AI inference cheaper than general-purpose GPUs
What’s In Their Stack?
This week: Angus Sewell McCann
AI engineer and founder of TempShift, Angus has 23 tools across 20 categories in his stack.
His AI layer includes Superwhisper, Gemini and Claude, with Antigravity handling AI-assisted coding and Granola covering meetings.
Then there's the rest of the stack: Attio, Slack, Superhuman, Perplexity, NotebookLM, n8n, Stripe, Luma, Railway and more. See Angus's full stack →
Want to see what’s in your stack? Map it with ELI.work
Stay curious.
Ghita