Every AI Number Needs A Denominator

On back-to-back days last week, two of the largest companies in the world put an AI number in front of their investors. TD Bank's chief executive said the bank had essentially hit its full-year target of two hundred million Canadian dollars in value from AI, with a quarter still to run. Salesforce said its customers had driven 3.2 billion "Agentic Work Units" in a single quarter, up 97% — a unit Salesforce invented six months ago, and which its own website defines as including "a prompt processed." Neither company published what it spent to get there.

A number without a denominator is not a return. It is a receipt.

In this episode, Stephen Forte covers:

• TD Bank's Q3 2026 earnings call (August 27, 2026): CEO Raymond Chun's exact words — "Three quarters into the year, we have essentially hit our fiscal 2026 target of $200 million in value from AI." The target was set publicly at TD's investor day a year earlier, and TD has reported against it on the same slide every quarter since: ~C$145MM at Q2, ~C$195MM at Q3.
• The operational number underneath the money, and the best fact in either disclosure: pre-adjudication on mortgage and home-equity applications cut from an average of 15 hours to under three minutes. Critically, the agent decides nothing — it prepares a summary memo, and a human underwriter still makes the call.
• What is not disclosed: no programme cost anywhere, so no denominator and no computable return. No split of the year-to-date figure between revenue and cost savings, though the medium-term target is split exactly that way (~C$500MM annualized revenue uplift and, separately, ~C$500MM annualized cost savings). And a forward-looking-statements endnote on the AI targets — the same legal warning label a company puts on an earnings forecast.
• The release-versus-call gap, sharpened: TD's 18-page earnings news release mentions AI four times and quantifies it zero times. The number lives in the slide deck and the transcript, both public, and almost nobody looks at them.
• Salesforce's Q2 FY2027 call (August 26, 2026) and the unit itself. Salesforce's own definition: "one discrete task accomplished by an AI agent... a prompt processed, a reasoning chain completed, or — most importantly — a tool invoked." And, on the same page, its answer to whether one unit equals a fixed amount of compute: "No. The relationship is elastic."
• Honest credit in both directions: TD set a public number before it had a result, reports against it every ninety days whether the quarter flatters it or not, and its own deck places automation and AI as one cost lever out of six (~C$500MM of a ~C$2–2.5B programme). Salesforce published its unit's elasticity itself, with nobody making it do so.
• Three questions for the next time an AI number lands on your desk: What is the denominator? Who defined the unit? And what would this number look like if it were bad?

Sources:

• TD Bank Group, Q3 2026 earnings call transcript (TD's own published transcript), August 27, 2026.
• TD Bank Group, Q3 2026 Results Presentation, slide 5 ("Accelerating AI Leadership") and its endnotes; Q2 2026 Results Presentation, slide 5; Q3 2026 Earnings News Release, August 27, 2026.
• TD Bank Group, "TD Launches Agentic AI to Transform Real Estate Secured Lending from End to End," May 21, 2026.
• Salesforce, "What are Agentic Work Units (AWU)?" (salesforce.com), and Salesforce Q2 fiscal 2027 earnings call, August 26, 2026 — Robin Washington and Marc Benioff.
• CIO.com, "AWU by Salesforce: a shiny new metric that tells CIOs little of value," February 27, 2026 — quoting Robert Kramer (Moor Insights and Strategy) and Sanchit Vir Gogia (Greyhound Research).

The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.