ROI measurement

The fifth-largest theme in the research: 114 of 268 documents, 41 organizations. Decomposed into 7 topics, each with its own issues, evidence and steps.

114documents in the theme
17issues named
40sourced citations
13organizations cited
10sourced statistics

The topics

Each opens a dossier with the same shape: what the state of it is, the issues ranked by how many independent organizations name them - or marked as our own analysis where none does - the disagreements, the numbers, and the concrete steps under each remedy.

Indicators & the management dashboard

Which numbers are tracked, how they are defined, and where they are read.

  • Adoption is measured because the vendor console reports it, not because it answers anything 1
  • The organizations tracking the most indicators report the weakest financial result 1
  • The dashboard exists, and no standing meeting reads it 1
  • and 1 more

50 documents · 24 organizations · 4 issues · 11 steps

What the evidence actually shows

Measured effects on real work, who they accrue to, and where they reverse.

  • The measured gains go to the least experienced, and can reverse for your best people 1
  • Function-level percentages describe potential, and are read as results 1
  • A faster task is not a faster process 1

45 documents · 20 organizations · 3 issues · 11 steps

Total cost of ownership

The denominator: run cost, tokens, rework, and the human review nobody budgeted.

  • The business case funds the build and not the running 2
  • The cost calculation leaves out the human review that makes the output usable 1

30 documents · 21 organizations · 2 issues · 6 steps

Pilot-to-production value

The distance between a pilot that worked and a number in the P&L.

  • The base rate is cancellation, and cost is the leading cause 1
  • Use-case counts are being reported instead of production systems ours

24 documents · 18 organizations · 2 issues · 6 steps

Baseline & attribution

Whether the gain can be shown to have come from the AI rather than from everything else that changed.

  • Almost nothing outside the academic work has a control group ours
  • The process was never measured before the AI arrived ours

23 documents · 17 organizations · 2 issues · 8 steps

Where the value leaks

Savings that are real in the process and absent from the accounts.

  • Time saved is not money saved unless the freed capacity is deliberately reused 2
  • The value sits in core operations and the investment goes to support functions 1

17 documents · 10 organizations · 2 issues · 5 steps

Business case & payback

How the spend gets approved, against what horizon, and by whom.

  • Willingness to invest is high and precision about the return is low 2
  • Spreading investment across many use cases halves the return 1

12 documents · 10 organizations · 2 issues · 8 steps

Where the sources disagree

Every recorded contradiction across the theme, in one place. These only exist because the documents were read against each other; no single publisher reveals them.

Use-case counts are being reported instead of production systemsPilot-to-production valueBoston Consulting Group dissents — Argues directly against the catalogue approach: leaders pursue few high-value opportunities with roughly double the ROI impact rather than hundreds of use cases.