Follow the Revenue

In 24 months, businesses and consumers will be spending $112B on AI — a third of what they spend on all SaaS today. Where does that money come from?

Revenue Flow

Provenance tier: 1 Sourced (A = first-party disclosure, B = ≥2 corroborating sources) 2 Derived (A = deterministic calc from Tier 1, B = triangulated) 3 Projected (A = anchored extrapolation, B = interpolated, C = scenario assumption) 4 Editorial (replace ASAP) — hover any node for source citation
? Why do the middle columns shrink? Each column shows the dollars that flow through it. Channels (Hyperscalers, Trad. SaaS) retain a margin before passing revenue to Model Providers — Hyperscalers clip ~20%, Trad. SaaS ~60%. That retained margin flows directly to Generated Cashflow (bottom right), bypassing Model Providers entirely. So each column is smaller than the one before it — the drop is the channel margin.
Click or hover a node to see flow details and tier provenance

The Profitability Ladder: Reading the "Where It Goes" Column

The right column of the sankey breaks every dollar into three buckets. Here's how they stack up — and why the gap between them matters more in AI than in traditional software.