Measuring GenAI ROI: Beyond the Pilot Hype
Priyanka Joshi
VP, Consulting, RippleCode
The GenAI budget conversation changed this year. "Everyone's doing it" no longer unlocks funding — CFOs want returns they can audit. Fortunately, AI ROI is measurable if you instrument for it from day one.
The four value categories
Time: hours returned to skilled staff, measured against documented baselines — physician documentation time, ticket handling time, contract review time. Quality: error rates, rework, compliance findings. Revenue: conversion lift, faster sales cycles, capacity to serve more customers. Risk: fraud caught, incidents prevented, audit costs reduced.
Instrument before you deploy
- Capture the baseline for 4–6 weeks before rollout — retro-fitted baselines are fiction
- Define the counterfactual: what does this task cost without AI?
- Track adoption honestly; a tool used by 20% of the team delivers 20% of the modeled value
Include all the costs
Inference spend, yes — but also integration engineering, evaluation maintenance, review time for AI outputs and change management. The pilots that "cost $40k" usually consumed triple that in unaccounted effort. Honest cost accounting builds the credibility that funds the next initiative.
What good looks like
Our strongest client results cluster in document-heavy workflows: 5–9× first-year returns on claims processing, clinical documentation and contract analysis. The common thread: high-volume, measurable tasks with clear baselines — not moonshots.