Calculate AI ROI Your CFO Will Approve

Four assets that turn one workflow into a dollar figure your finance team can trace, in about 90 minutes

Your company is spending on AI. At some point, somebody above you asks what that spending returned, and the answer has to be a figure rather than a description.

It’s more difficult than it seems because no one documented the costs of running a workflow before the tools were introduced, leaving you without earlier figures to compare today’s performance against. Usage goes up, people report saving time, but none of it converts into dollars anyone can put in a budget.

This article gets you that figure for one workflow, and gets it accurate enough to put in front of your finance team.

The method is a Friction Ledger, which is three columns you fill in for a single workflow before you spend anything. Column one is frequency, which is how many times a week the task happens. Column two is proximity to cash, which is how many steps sit between that task and cash entering or leaving your company. Column three is handoff cost, which is how many minutes a person spends on the output after your AI produces it. Column three decides whether the workflow returns dollars or costs them, because every minute your reviewer spends is a minute subtracted from what the AI saved.

Thursday’s live session ran that through a worked example. You can open the slides I used for that here.

Getting from the method to your own figure takes about 90 minutes, spread across a week.

Every workflow has a review time above which it costs your company more than it returns. Cross that line and your AI spending is a loss, however good the tool is. Almost nobody knows their own figure, and one formula produces it in under a minute.

The rest of this article gives you four things:

1. A spreadsheet with the break-even formula already in it, where you enter your own workflow’s numbers and read the annual return off the bottom.

2. Nine questions to ask the person who usually manually runs the workflow, so your timings come from watching rather than remembering.

3. A prompt that turns those numbers into a one-page summary you can send to your finance team.

4. Six slides you can copy for the meeting where leadership decides whether to keep paying for your AI tools.