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AI ROI calculator: a business case that survives the board.

Most AI ROI calculators assume the AI is always right, nobody checks its work and the running cost is a rounding error. This one puts in what really decides whether a case holds, and shows you the range rather than a single heroic number.

What's inside

• The costs other calculators leave out: human review time, the errors that still slip through, run cost per item from tokens and price, an adoption ramp measured in quarters, and the cost of building the evaluation suite.
• Low, Base and High side by side, so the board sees the base case inside an honest range.
• Break-even values for each assumption: how far accuracy, review time, adoption or the realised share of freed time can move before the three-year NPV hits zero.
• A one-page board summary: the decision you want, the numbers, the three assumptions most likely to change the answer, and a success metric and kill criterion agreed before the pilot starts.
• A worked example (an onboarding document-check queue, illustrative numbers) so you can see what sensible inputs look like before you enter yours.

For COOs, CFOs, CTOs and heads of operations or transformation about to ask for budget for an AI use case, or handed one to approve. Excel or LibreOffice; about 20 minutes to a first draft.

How do you calculate the ROI of AI?

Start with the cost of one item of work today: the minutes it takes, what those minutes cost, and what the errors cost. Then work out the same item with AI, honestly: the share the AI can handle, its accuracy on a test set of your own real items, the time a person spends checking its work, the errors that get past that check, and the run cost per item. The difference, multiplied by the volume that actually adopts the new process each quarter, is the benefit. Take off the one-off build and the running costs, and discount what is left. The answer you take to the board is a range, plus the few assumptions it depends on.