Insights / AI strategy
AI strategy · By Naveen Gainedi, Founder & CEO
The AI ROI question boards are asking is the wrong one
Q3 board meetings are coming. Most CIOs already know the question they'll get: what ROI are we seeing on our AI spend? It's a fair question, but the wrong one to ask first.
Originally shared on LinkedIn.
Here's the sequence most companies ran. Bought Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise licenses in 2025. Six months later the developers wanted Claude Code, so now you're paying for both. Meanwhile the technology teams shipped knowledge assistants, copilots on every internal app, natural-language-to-SQL. A lot of activity.
Now the board wants the return on all of it.
The ROI is hard to measure this early, and the investments are too young to have produced much impact either way. Which makes it the wrong first question.
A better one: what kinds of projects did the AI budget actually go into? Because the type of project has a direct bearing on the return you can expect.
Three kinds, roughly
Human Augmentation. Knowledge Access. Workflow Transformation.
These aren't three sizes of the same investment. They're three different kinds of return, and one ROI number averages across all of them.
Human Augmentation
Does a person do the same work faster?
Knowledge Access
Does AI help people get to information more effectively?
Workflow Transformation
Has the business process itself changed because AI exists?
Most organizations spent the bulk of the budget on the first, less on the second, least on the third. That's not wrong on its own — augmentation and access are the groundwork transformation depends on. The problem is when the budget stops there. The potential sits in the layer that usually gets funded last, because it takes the most organizational creativity, not just buying licenses or tacking on chatbots.
The money went where deployment is easy and risk is low. Which means most AI budgets are concentrated in the category with the lowest ceiling, and the board is asking for returns the spending was never structured to produce.
So before asking what return the AI investments generated, a board might ask what kinds of projects the budget went into in the first place. The answer tells you whether you funded faster individuals, better access to what you already know, or a genuinely different way of operating.
Next step
Not sure which category your AI budget actually funded?
The Data & AI Opportunity Assessment starts from your business, not your tech stack, and gives you a prioritized, evidence-based read on where the real return sits.