The VienerX Newsletter

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VienerX team is heading to the center of the technology universe at the Channel Partners Conference and Expo in Las Vegas. VienerX will connect with our vendors including Samsung, HP/Poly, Nextiva, and more. We most look forward to connecting with you, our channel partners. The conference and the connections it enables help us continue to bring our clients and partners top of the line products and the best value.

“I am looking forward to meeting with our trusted partners” Founder/CEO Wayne Viener said. “Last year, Channel Partners was an engine for growth for VienerX and helped cement our role as both a partner and provider in the technology channel. We are excited to attend the conference again in 2026.” For more on the channel, check out this previous newsletter.

This is the second consecutive year VienerX will attend the conference. As technology continues to evolve and grow, it is our mission to stay ahead of the curve and continue to connect with partners who value reliability, responsiveness, and a human‑first approach to IT.

Wayne, Shane Gossert, who is an industry veteran, and Chief Brand Officer Jordan Viener will attending the show at the Venetian in Las Vegas from April 13-16.

Be sure to follow the VienerX social media channels for coverage and updates live from Las Vegas, and be sure to check our next newsletter after the event for all the highlights from VienerX at Channel Partners.

About Channel Partners

Channel Partners Conference & Expo is the largest and most influential gathering of technology vendors, tech advisors, MSPs, VARs, integrators, and ecosystem leaders in North America. For more than 25 years, the event has served as the central meeting point for the companies and people shaping the future of the IT channel.

The event brings together thousands of industry professionals for four days of education, innovation, and high‑value networking across cloud, security, connectivity, AI, and managed services.

In this very newsletter about six weeks ago, we wrote about the explosion of Artificial Intelligence commercials at the Super Bowl, the negative consumer reception to them, and mused if, as with similar technology trends of the past, there was a downturn coming in the AI market. We aren’t sure if it is fair to say we called it or it not, but regardless the first major closure of the AI era struck last week, as OpenAI announced that it’s video generation platform, Sora, would be shutting down.

OpenAI did not give a reason as to why it was shutting down Sora, but one factor that several sources have pointed out is the staggering cost to keeping the operation running. Sora, which ran for about a year total, and six months as a standalone app, was estimated to cost over $15 million dollars a day to run, which equates to $5.4 billion dollars a year in operating costs (Forbes). This is obviously already a lot of money to spend on a product, but is even more jaw dropping when you factor in the app was free to use, had no ads baked into the initial model to help generate revenue, and the most expensive memberships, which also increased costs because those members could make higher quality videos, would max out at $200 per year.

All of this means that, in order to even approach breaking even, Sora needed to have around 27 million users at its max tier, which was simply never going to happen.

Video generation has a problem somewhat unique to it in the world of AI, its output is extremely expensive. AI generated videos are the single most expensive AI product to produce. Forbes estimated that, for 10 seconds of LLM generated video, it costs approximately $1.30 to make, which is, to put it bluntly, a fortune to produce at scale. The $15 million dollar a day figure referenced earlier is solely based on that output figure, it did not factor in human resources, rent, or any other costs associated with running a business, that was simply based on the computing resources need to generate the core product.

While simple text chat queries that are common for ChatGPT, CoPilot, and others on the higher end cost $0.05, Sora as a platform cost 2600% more than that for every prompt generated.

While cost was likely the largest factor in Sora’s downfall, it is not the one getting the most attention. There are two other considerations that we will touch on that may ultimately be bigger stories.

1)       User base: In what we’re sure came as a surprise to many, Sora, despite OpenAI’s market permanence and resources, simply could not retain an audience at scale. While a Tik-Tok style feed with AI generated videos sounded like an investors dream, the monthly active user count topped out at just over 6 million in December and dropped to well under 4.8 million in February (for comparison, Tik Tok has over 1.6 billion monthly active users). While Sora’s monthly app downloads collapsed to barley over one million in February from a peak of over 6 million (Yahoo Finance). Simply put, people were not using the app nearly enough to justify the cost.

2)       Copyright Concerns: This is the one that is dominating the water cooler at VienerX, Copyright. No one, not creators, not studios, not lawmakers, not even the AI companies, can agree on what “fair use” actually means in the age of generative AI. If Sora was trained on copyrighted clips (and many believe it was), every output could be considered a legal question waiting to happen. With lawsuits piling up across the industry, this uncertainty may have been much more dangerous than the cost problem. This problem extends to LLM’s in general, and it may just be a matter of time before the question is brought up in courts around the world.

One thing we discussed in our Super Bowl column was that, at some point, AI has to start making money. Thus far, LLM AI has been in somewhat of extended demo phase to the public, with very few products attempting to become monetized. As many who pay attention to financial and/or technology news could tell you, that honeymoon phase is rapidly approaching its end.

OpenAI is expected spend over $600 billion dollars in the next four years, which is sharply contrasted with the fact that it pulled in only $13.1 billion dollars in revenue in 2025. Sora was bleeding funds with no clear path to carrying its weight. OpenAI and other companies in the space are expected to continue culling their products and attempting to streamline to optimize operationally and pull in more revenue.

AI is not going anywhere, but expect moves like this to continue as the worldwide demo phase approaches its end and businesses now turn their focus to what the goal always has been, how do we make money?

America is known as the “melting pot.”

From a technology perspective, it is something more important.

It is the Great Integrator.

No country in the modern world has brought more people, more disciplines, and more ways of building things together into one operating system. The result is not just diversity. It is compounded capability.

To understand that, go back to the early 1900s.

When Italians, Poles, Jews, and Swedes came to America, they did not arrive empty-handed. They brought technology. Not digital technology, but something more foundational. Process, engineering, craft, and systems thinking.

We tend to forget that.

Italian immigrants brought building technology that dates back not 100 years, but thousands. Ancient Rome mastered infrastructure. Aqueducts, roads, structural design that still stands today. That knowledge evolved over generations into masonry, stonework, and concrete techniques that helped build American cities. This was not just labor. It was inherited engineering discipline.

Polish immigrants strengthened the industrial core. Metalworking, machining, tool-and-die. This is where precision manufacturing takes shape. The ability to produce the same part, the same way, over and over again. That is technology. Without that, there is no scale.

Jewish immigrants rethought production systems entirely. The garment industry is the clearest example. They transformed clothing from custom craft into scalable manufacturing. Patterns, workflow, distribution. They introduced process design into production. That mindset is now embedded in everything from supply chains to modern software deployment.

Swedish immigrants brought a different kind of technology. Mechanical discipline. Clean engineering. A focus on reliability and doing things correctly the first time. That influence shows up in how American industry began to think about quality, not just output.

Here is the turning point.

Manufacturing did not follow technology. Manufacturing created it.

As America scaled production, new problems appeared. Speed versus quality. Consistency versus customization. Training versus output. Those pressures forced innovation. Innovation became process. Process became technology.

That pattern has not changed.

A good way to understand this is through Swiss watchmaking.

Swiss watchmaking is pure technology. It is specialized, precise, and almost entirely analog. No cloud. No software. Yet the level of accuracy and repeatability is extraordinary. It proves a simple point. Technology is not defined by computers. It is defined by precision and control.

Most of that capability stayed in Switzerland. It did not integrate at scale the way it did in America.

America’s advantage was integration.

Different groups brought different technologies. America combined them, scaled them, and turned them into systems. Those systems became modern industry.