Calculating the Return on Generative AI InvestmentCalculating the Return on Generative AI Investment

As companies progress with trying and deploying generative AI within their collaboration environment, IT and business leaders often struggle with determining ROI. While this struggle is amplified when the decision to roll out generative AI copilots and virtual assistants will requiring purchasing additional licenses, any tech decision-maker needs to be able to assess whether genAI capabilities are a net positive even when provided by collaboration vendors at no additional cost.

Measuring What Matters

Metrigy’s success methodology typically looks at three areas of ROI. These include:

Our recently published Employee Engagement Optimization: 2025 global study of 400 organizations showed that just a third of participating companies are already measuring positive ROI for their generative AI deployments. However, a larger percentage of business and IT leaders are bullish on positive ROI, with 41% saying they expect future benefits from their use of generative AI. Just 11.5% say that generative AI is over-hyped and isn’t likely to deliver on its promise.

For those who do measure generative AI benefit, the most frequently measured metric is “time savings,” with 36.1% of respondents doing so already. However, an additional 50% of participating companies expect to measure time savings by the end of 2025.

Time savings may come from a variety of factors including:

Is Time Savings Good Enough?

Though time savings is the most measured ROI component, it’s not the only one that matters. Companies may find additional value from closing more sales more quickly, reducing the need to hire staff by augmenting existing personnel with AI, or by improving marketing and sales campaigns and content development via application of generative AI tools.

Those who focus solely on time savings may wonder if time saved actually equals business benefit. What if, for example, that five hours a week one saves via using generative AI simply means five more hours to read social media or play games at work? Or, perhaps companies could use time savings generated via AI to reduce work hours?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to that question. However, associated time savings with specific activities such as software development cycles, customer follow-up time, and reduction in time spent on company-specific repeatable activities often provide more beneficial information. Surveying employees to find out how they are using their time savings is another potential way to uncover unknown business benefits.

But What About Costs? What Are They?

As noted, most companies are not yet measuring ROI for their use of generative AI. We often find that companies who are taking advantage of free tools are less likely to worry about ROI. But even free isn’t necessarily free when one considers the need to manage AI from a governance, security, and potentially a compliance perspective. In our study, 71.1% of companies had an AI governance strategy in place by the end of 2024, with application of data privacy controls, testing AI response accuracy, security management, and compliance being the top components of their governance approach.

In addition, companies with the highest ROI for their generative AI investments often spend more time and money on training their employees to best utilize AI tools available to them. Successful companies are also more apt to monitor AI utilization to determine which employees are struggling to use AI tools and why. Training and management costs should be measured against demonstrated AI benefit as part of ROI calculation.

The Path Forward

Not every company will go through the effort of determining generative AI ROI but those that do are best positioned to not only uncover potential benefits, but to also address adoption shortcomings that limit AI’s utilization in future lines of business. Generative AI ROI assessment is critical to determine if the costs of buying and managing AI add-ons delivers value that exceeds cost.

About Metrigy: Metrigy is an innovative research and advisory firm focusing on the rapidly changing areas of workplace collaboration, digital workplace, digital transformation, customer experience and employee experience—along with several related technologies. Metrigy delivers strategic guidance and informative content, backed by primary research metrics and analysis, for technology providers and enterprise organizations