Yesterday I saw the survey results from a room full of executives with some surprising results.

A conference organizer had polled about a hundred attendees ahead of an AI focused event. Eighty three percent said AI had improved their work. Thirty percent said the investment had actually paid for itself.

I think we're all experiencing this right now. I call it "modern day magic". AI delivers on so much so quickly. Not always the best, but faster and sometimes better than on our own. So the question is: why do so few people feel that the investment pays for itself?

The reason is that comfort is easy to self report and it flatters everyone. Ask someone if AI has helped them and they will say yes, because it probably has, in some diffuse way that felt good in the moment. ROI asks a harder question. What number did you expect to move, and what did it look like before you started. Almost nobody takes that baseline, because by the time you're excited enough to start, you've already skipped the step where you would have written it down.

The fix is one sentence, written earlier than feels natural.

Pick one workflow where AI is already involved, and before you touch it again, write down the single number it's supposed to move. Hours saved on a specific report. Dollars spent on a specific subscription. Days to close something that used to take weeks. Not a vibe. A number.

Then ask your team a sharper question than "has this helped." Ask what they'd actually notice if you turned it off for a week. If the honest answer is nothing, you've found a line item to cut. If the honest answer is panic, you've found your baseline, three months late but not too late to use.

Feeling helped and being able to prove it are two different projects. Only one of them survives budget season.

Alex