AI ROI Calculator
Calculate your AI investment payback in 60 seconds, based on real numbers from 50+ shipped AI projects. Free, instant, no email required
hours/week
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YOUR AI ROI
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Annual ROI
BREAKDOWN
- AI Build Cost$
- Annual Token Cost$
- Annual Time Savings$
- Revenue Uplift$
- Net Annual Benefit$
- Payback Period
AI ROI FAQs
How do you calculate AI ROI?
AI ROI = (Annual Benefits − Annual AI Cost) / AI Build Cost × 100. Benefits = (hours saved per week × hourly rate × 52 + revenue uplift). Costs = build cost + LLM token costs + maintenance. Payback period = build cost / annual net benefit.
What's a good AI ROI?
AI projects with payback in 6-12 months and 2-5x annual ROI are typical when done right. Common high-ROI use cases: customer support deflection (60-80% ticket reduction), sales enablement (RAG over CRM data), AI-assisted operations (automating manual data work).
Why do most AI projects fail to deliver ROI?
Top failures: (1) wrong use-case selection, usually too ambitious, (2) skipping the evaluation harness, so quality drops in production, (3) underestimating maintenance cost such as LLM tokens, drift and retraining, (4) focusing on tech instead of the business outcome.
What's the typical cost of an AI build?
AI POC: $15K-$45K. Production AI app: $50K-$200K. Enterprise AI platform: $200K-$1M+. Annual LLM token costs scale with usage, typically 5-15% of build cost in year-1, growing with adoption.