AI spending is climbing faster than almost any other line on the corporate income statement, yet the return on it is rarely disclosed in terms investors can actually evaluate. As the numbers grow, the market will not reward the companies that spend the most on AI, but the ones that can show that spending converts into measurable productivity, revenue and EPS.

The 25 questions below, as well as the scorecard at the end, are how to tell durable, margin-expanding AI economics from expensive experimentation.