The CFO's guide to AI training ROI

Training budgets survive scrutiny when they produce evidence. The good news: AI capability programmes are unusually measurable, because the work they change is digital and instrumented.

The four-line model

Our clients model ROI on four lines. Time reclaimed: hours per week saved on trained workflows, priced at loaded cost. Quality lift: error-rate or rework reduction on measured processes. Velocity: cycle-time compression on revenue-touching workflows. Retention: reduced attrition among trained staff — consistently underestimated, consistently real.

• A 200-person operations team saving 4 hours/week at $60 loaded cost ≈ $2.5M annualised.
• A 2-point error-rate drop on claims processing pays for most programmes alone.
• Attrition among trained cohorts runs 30–40% lower in our client data.

Instrument before you train

The discipline that separates measurable programmes from anecdotal ones is baseline capture. Before a cohort starts, we snapshot the target workflows: cycle times, error rates, throughput. Ninety days after graduation, we measure again. That difference — not satisfaction surveys — is the return.

Run your own numbers in the ROI Calculator on our AI Lab. It uses the same model, with your inputs, and produces a board-ready summary you can export.