Gross Margin in the Age of AI

AI infrastructure is changing how gross margin behaves. Inference costs scale with customer usage. Model selection can shift unit economics overnight. Training and experimentation cycles create spend patterns that don't map to traditional capacity planning. Most finance teams are still booking all of it as a single line item.

Ed Barrow (Cloud Capital) and Ben Murray (The SaaS CFO) will break down the cost dynamics behind AI infrastructure, why they make gross margin increasingly difficult to interpret, and what finance teams need to do about it. The session covers a GAAP/IFRS-grounded classification framework as the starting point, then moves into the harder questions: how inference and training costs scale differently, what that does to margin as AI adoption accelerates, and how to build forecasting and governance practices that keep pace.

Attendees will leave understanding what their AI-adjusted gross margin actually looks like today, how it will change as usage grows, and what governance and forecasting practices they need in place now.