Olga Shpuntenko
Founder
About
After more than 20 years of leading HR in high-growth technology companies, Olga Shpuntenko has shifted her focus to AI, DevX, and engineering effectiveness. An engineer by training and a People & AI executive, she works on AI-enabled workflows, engineering culture, and improving developer experience across distributed teams, and also develops her own AI products for HR.
Talk
Olga Shpuntenko | The Hidden Cost of AI: Human Verification as Compute
Human-in-the-Loop, AI Economics, AI Agents, Developer Productivity
AI costs are easy to see when they arrive as a license fee or an API bill. The time people spend checking AI output is much harder to spot.
An agent may produce code or analysis in seconds, but someone still has to decide whether the result is correct, safe to use, and good enough to ship. Usually, that reviewer is a senior engineer, whose time is among the most expensive on the team.
This talk looks at AI-assisted work as an end-to-end system and shows how to account for the human effort around the model. It also examines how much human verification the workflow needs, what that verification costs, and where it can be safely automated.