Denver AI: License to Bill

💳 Denver AI Presents: License to Bill — The Economics of Putting AI to Work
You’ve rolled out licenses across the team, stood up a few pilots, and put agents into production workflows. Now the invoices are landing - and procurement wants a word.
The smart move isn’t cutting spend. It’s building the discipline to tell a line item that’s compounding returns from one that’s quietly burning budget on an experiment nobody owns. ⏸️
Join Denver AI for a panel on the economics of enterprise AI — built for business owners, executives, and the leaders accountable for the P&L impact of AI adoption. We’ll focus on three decisions:

💸 Where the spend actually goes
The cost drivers that stay invisible until renewal, when premium tier pricing is justified, and how to surface redundant tooling across business units.

📊 When to increase investment
What separates a scalable capability from a stalled pilot, how to build the business case for expansion, and the opportunity cost of under-investing while competitors move.

✅ How to demonstrate return
Measuring impact beyond “hours saved,” establishing clear ownership and accountability for AI spend, and the governance guardrails that enable experimentation without unlimited exposure.

OUR PANELISTS
Zach Johnson
Head of FinOps and Cloud Platforms at Splunk (Cisco). He has managed enterprise cloud budgets at scale, including programs that saved over $10M a year, and now applies FinOps discipline to AI.
🔗 linkedin.com/in/realzachjohnson

David Jitendranath
Director of AI Apps and Agents at Lantern and founder of Modestack. He has led 80+ digital transformation projects, from $250K to $20M, and knows where AI budgets pay off and where they leak.
🔗 linkedin.com/in/djitendranath

Eric Smith
Principal Consultant and Agentic Engineering Service Line Leader at Lantern. His team builds multi-agent systems that track their own cost and ROI, and his model router matches each task to the right LLM so teams don’t overpay.
🔗 linkedin.com/in/snericsmith

📋 EVENT DETAILS
📅 Wednesday, October 21, 2026
📍 Sturm Hall, University of Denver, 2000 E. Asbury Ave
⚠️ Sturm Hall — not the Sturm College of Law
🍕 4:00 – 4:30 PM — Pizza and meet time
⚡ 4:30 – 6:00 PM — Community updates, AI in Action, and the panel discussion
🍻 6:00 PM on — Après AI
RSVP today. Your AI has a license to work — not an unlimited expense account. 😉

🏔️ ABOUT DENVER AI
Denver AI brings people together to learn, adopt, and apply AI responsibly through practical conversations, shared experiences, and community connections.