Businesses need to look ‘beyond the looking glass’ of financial ROI to measure AI’s true value

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be transforming how businesses operate, but figuring out the return on investment (ROI) is proving harder to pin down.

According to a report published by Deloitte last year, most organisations need two to four years to see a satisfactory ROI from a typical AI use case. 

Compared to the seven-to-12-month payback expected on more run-of-the-mill technology projects, it’s easy to see why some business leaders might be getting anxious about their investment in AI. 

The importance of ROI 

Clearly, this is a concern that cannot simply be shrugged off. But I would argue that quantitative results are only one measure of success. 

Indeed, businesses also need to look at the more qualitative measures, such as what the technology enables employees to do differently, how much time it gives them back, and what that means for the way work gets done.

For instance, a recent focus group with IT professionals from our THWACK community – the people on the frontline responsible for keeping an organisation’s technology operational and secure – found that half expect autonomous AI agents to improve efficiency. 

How AI is helping front-line IT teams

Specifically, they talked about how AI enables them to work differently by removing repetitive work, improving productivity, speeding up decision-making, and preventing problems before they escalate. 

They also said that it helped to reduce the need for manual work, such as systems monitoring and vulnerability management. 

What we’re witnessing – not just in IT monitoring but across the board – is a more fundamental shift in the way work is organised. 

At its heart, it is changing which tasks they need to do themselves, which can be handed over to machines, and where their time and judgement are best spent.

And it’s that last point that intrigues me. Namely, what do businesses – and employees themselves – do with that time once they have it back? 

Reinvesting time back into the business

One option is to reinvest it back into the business. The latest IT Trends research from SolarWinds found that IT professionals are spending more time on proactive strategy, managing tools, and preventing problems, and less on traditional tasks such as incident response.

More than half also said their roles have become more strategic over the past two years, while AI is already helping to reduce manual effort and speed up root-cause analysis.

It’s an important observation because there is rarely a shortage of work waiting to be done. Time reclaimed from routine monitoring or firefighting can instead be spent improving systems, tackling technical debt, or addressing problems before they become tomorrow’s incidents.

Reinvest in professional development

Another option is to give some of that time back to employees to develop their own core skills.

According to PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, AI is shifting the skills employers look for when hiring and placing greater value on capabilities like judgement, leadership, and creativity.

If AI is creating a “productivity boom” as some people claim, then spending time on training, certifications, learning new tools, or simply keeping pace with the latest technologies available is a good investment of time. 

There is also a practical business benefit. If organisations want people to work effectively alongside AI, they need to give them the time to learn how. While AI can help improve efficiency, effective and token-efficient prompting is a skill that must be learned, and that’s only the barest baseline for AI skills.

Reinvest it in personal time

And there is a third option, my personal favorite. And that is simply to give people some of the time back from these AI-powered productivity gains to spend how they please. 

If it allows someone to clock off at five rather than having to work into the evening, then why shouldn’t they be able to benefit from those gains?

After all, how often do we hear about the detrimental impact on wellbeing and morale caused by an out-of-sync work/life balance? 

It’s very easy to overlook the human element in the rush to do more with less. Yet when people are excluded from the equation, businesses risk losing sight of the fact that success isn’t measured by numbers alone. 

A looking-glass moment 

Wherever you look, AI is bringing about a profound change in the workplace. One colleague described it to me as a “looking-glass moment”, referring to Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass, where Alice steps into a world turned upside down. 

That feels apt. What’s more, I’m tempted to extend the metaphor to our use of traditional metrics as well. 

Of course, the numbers still matter. But if AI helps someone build new skills, avoid burnout, spend more time solving problems that matter – or simply get home in time to walk the dog or put their children to bed – then that is definitely a worthwhile return on investment in my book. 

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