You can't walk into a huge tech co and make a dent because huge tech co already has hundreds of engineers on that job full time. Just look at the papers coming out of huge tech co's. They will publish if their technique saves them 0.2%. That's how tight things are already wired in the big leagues.
The real money is in huge non-tech co, or medium tech co. You could walk into a goldman sachs type of operation and point out savings in CPU time that would be 90-99%. But they're not going to care, because their corporate structures aren't wired to observe and act on such things.
If you make a dent on server bills on the order of several million dollars a year generally it's not too difficult to make a case that you should be allowed to continue.
The real money is in huge non-tech co, or medium tech co. You could walk into a goldman sachs type of operation and point out savings in CPU time that would be 90-99%. But they're not going to care, because their corporate structures aren't wired to observe and act on such things.