What is the ROI of an AI project?

AI ROI is the net business value an AI system generates against its cost, measured with a metric agreed before starting.

Beyond the cost of building

ROI is not just how much it costs to develop a system, but the value it produces once running —time saved, errors avoided, volume handled without expanding the team— against its total cost of building and operating. That is why it is assessed on AI in production, not on a demo that is never actually used.

The metric is agreed beforehand

The key is to set a clear, single success metric before starting. Without that criterion, any result seems justifiable and none is demonstrable. A metric defined in advance also forces you to choose use cases with real value and connects with AI governance: what is measured, who is accountable and how it is reviewed.

How we approach it at Codara

Our method starts from a business metric agreed per project: if it cannot be defined, we do not sign. We research where AI creates real advantage, take it to production and measure the result against that criterion.