After blowing through an undisclosed but apparently eye-watering sum on enterprise AI tools, Rippling built a product called AI Spend Console to track exactly how much every employee and team is spending on AI, and whether it's working. The company's own profligacy became the product brief. Simultaneously, Bank of America's head of market strategy is citing AI buildout as the reason to stay bullish on US equities. Everyone is spending. No one quite knows the return. The measurement industry is now growing faster than the thing it measures.
The Accountability Tool as Displacement Activity
There's a recursive absurdity here worth sitting with. Rippling's response to overspending on AI was to build more AI-adjacent software to rationalize the overspending. This is the enterprise tech equivalent of buying an expensive planner to organize all the tasks you're already failing to complete. A 2023 paper in MIS Quarterly by Rai and colleagues argued that digital investment in measurement infrastructure frequently substitutes for actual operational change, creating what they call accountability theater. Rippling has essentially productized its own accountability theater and is now selling it to others in the same situation.
When the Dashboard Becomes the Deliverable
The University of California faculty pushing to reinstate SAT and ACT scores are running the same loop in higher education: a measurable proxy for an immeasurable quality (student potential) gets abandoned for being imperfect, then gets missed because the alternative is even less legible. Across sectors, the ROI reflex is producing dashboards, consoles, and scorecards faster than it is producing outcomes. Scott Belsky has written precisely about this dynamic. As he describes in his Implications newsletter, precision generative workflows create the illusion of optimization while deferring the harder question of what we actually want to optimize for.