You Ask, I Answer: Time-Based ROI of AI?

In today’s episode, you’ll learn how to measure the ROI of AI even when the primary benefit is time savings. You’ll discover a simple yet effective method for converting time savings into a financial metric, allowing you to demonstrate the value of AI in a concrete way. I’ll walk you through a practical example and explain the importance of tracking your current ROI before evaluating the impact of AI. Tune in to gain valuable insights into measuring the true impact of AI on your business!

You Ask, I Answer: Time-Based ROI of AI?

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In today’s episode, Michael asks, “How do you demonstrate the ROI of AI when you only have time savings?”

This is a really good question because we’re talking about—instead of return on investment, the standard financial formula—we’re almost talking about return on operations, return on essentially time savings.

Time savings is good, especially if you’re seeking increases in productivity—with the caveat, and this was something that folks mentioned on LinkedIn, that if you use the time poorly that you save, then there’s no benefit. If you save five hours a week on creating content and then you spend that five hours playing Candy Crush, you really haven’t done anything to increase the value of the time that you saved. However, if you were able to save that time and then do things that are equally or more profitable, then that time savings would have financial meaning.

So, here’s the basic formula for ROI. That’s a given. Earn minus spent divided by spent, that is ROI, that is return on investment—that is immutable, it is unchangeable, it is what it is.

If you were to do something that’s more like return on time savings or return on operational efficiency, it would look something like this: How much time did you spend on the task the old way of doing things? How much time do you spend on it the new way? And then use the same formula: new minus old divided by old will get you the percentage of time savings.

Now, here’s where you have to connect it to something of value. Assuming that you are productive, assuming that you are able to make the most of those time savings, then you would account for the time savings with your effective hourly rate.

Because there’s two forms of currency when it comes to ROI and return on efficiency. There is hard currency, which is where you give money to somebody else—you buy ads with it. And then there’s soft currency, which is opportunity cost. If you spend eight hours on a task, that’s eight hours you don’t have for another task.

So let’s say you earn, I don’t know, $50,000 a year or whatever, and you work 2,000 hours a year. If you do the math on that, your effective hourly rate is$ 25 an hour. Now, if a task took 24 hours at that $25 an hour rate, that’d be$ 600. If the same task took two hours using AI, at the same $25 an hour rate, that would be$ 50. So your return on efficiency there would be 50 minus 600 divided by 600—new minus old divided by old. And that gets you a 92% return on the efficiency of the change.

That’s a gigantic number. Now, obviously, it makes sense if you spent essentially three working days on a task and you boil that down to a quarter of one day—that’s a big savings.

If you don’t have any other financial measures other than time—because time isn’t money, technically, time is money from a certain point of view—but if you have your effective hourly rate, based on your total compensation divided by the number of hours you work in a year, that can get you to a money number that you can then use for things like return on investment formulas.

So to answer Michael’s question, that’s how you demonstrate the ROI of AI when you only have time—you need to turn that time into money by multiplying it times your effective hourly rate, and then you can perform your standard ROI calculation: new minus old divided by old. When it’s new spend—time is money—minus old spend divided by old spend.

Is that the best way to value AI? Maybe, maybe not. Because it assumes that the work quality is the same, it makes a bunch of assumptions. And if your work quality improves while you’re using AI, then that formula would not capture that, it would only capture the time savings. Likewise, if you are driving real revenue, you would need to incorporate that revenue as well as your efficiency savings into the formula as well.

So there’s multiple angles that you can use to get at the ROI of AI with time savings. But you need to have the data first.

And as I said, in my newsletter a few weeks ago on the ROI of AI, if you don’t have the ROI of what you’re doing now, then calculating the ROI of AI makes no sense, because why bother? If you don’t know where you’re starting from, then you don’t know if things are better. If you never time yourself running the 100-meter dash and then you get new shoes, and you time yourself running the 100-meter dash, you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve improved.” How would you know if you didn’t time the original?

So if you’re not doing ROI computations today, on the way you’re doing things now, doing them for AI doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Anyway, thanks for the question. I’ll talk to you on the next one. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already. And if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.

You Ask, I Answer: Time-Based ROI of AI?

Machine-Generated Transcript

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