Successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
Your CFO Wants a Number
That conversation is coming if it hasn't already.
If you've started deploying AI and you can't show the math yet, you're not alone. A lot of organizations bought the capability before they agreed on the measurement.
Delivering clear ROI has been the number one struggle for most businesses that started in their AI journey. What’s interesting is that the AI deployments I have seen and the one’s that have failed to produce are typically the generic chatbot deployments.
Someone convinced an executive that deploying Claude or Copilot in their organization was going to change the productivity landscape of the organization. Those are also the people that have a deep desire for technology and a creative problem solving brain. They can see the potential, refine their inputs and get amazing results from their own workflows. You know the problem though… Not everyone thinks like that and not every workflow has a clear use-case for an AI assistant.
This is where the sticky note wins. The best use cases are usually in-plain-site and found on a sticky note. You know, the note that tells someone the process, highlights a few exceptions, or critiques the quality of work. The note is a sign that your system or process could benefit from AI.
Cleveland Construction (a GC) in Ohio was spending two hours reviewing every submittal. AI cut that to under ten minutes. Cycle times went from 55 days to 13. Every PM got almost 2 months of their capacity back a year and quality so good that an architect in Orlando referred them to a second project. I guarantee those submittals were covered in sticky notes.
That's the ROI story. It’s a clear way to reduce human error or labor to solve a specific problem. In the case of the Ohio GC, the ROI was significant and that means they can bid on more work throughout the year.
For some companies, these problems have existed for so long they just look like furniture. This is where having access to an industry expert can unlock your thinking and help you find the buried treasure in your business.
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Here’s your three step plan
Here's how I build the business case. Three things you need to measure.
First, time recovered. How many hours per week is your team spending on work AI can do? Multiply that by your blended hourly rate. That's the floor of your ROI.
Second, errors caught. What does a compliance miss cost you? A waterproofing warranty discrepancy caught before install might save you $200K in rework. A missed security config might cost you $15 per endpoint just to remediate the event. Identify these numbers.
Third, capacity created. What can your team do now that they couldn't before? This one's hard to put on a spreadsheet, but it's usually where compounding value lives.
The CIO’s that are winning on AI ROI haven’t just deployed tools. They're the ones who saw the tree from the forest and identified a problem with a real dollar amount attached to it, deployed AI against that problem specifically, and measured the delta.
If you can't tell me what problem AI is solving in your org right now, and what that problem costs you annually, you don't have an ROI story.
Get specific. Find the expensive thing. Build the case from there.
Look for the sticky notes.
Until next week,
—Jared
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