This is part three of a CFO Brew series exploring the biggest AI takeaways from the recent Workiva Amplify 2025 conference.
AI use cases and the necessity of good data were hot topics at this year’s Workiva Amplify conference. And while experts discussed at length all the promised disruption and innovation, they acknowledged they were still working out how to measure return on their AI investment.
The main hangup? It’s difficult to quantify time savings and risk reduction.
“We are constantly looking at the return on investment and what the output is actually giving us in return,” Heather Holding, chief risk officer of consumer loan fintech Best Egg, said at a panel session. AI is a clear time-saver for Best Egg employees, she said, but putting that into dollars and cents is more difficult.
“We’re really trying to figure out a way to measure, to be honest with you,” Holding said. “It’s very hard to measure efficiency with the AI tools today, and that’s something we’re trying to get our heads around. But it’s something that you are all going to have to figure out.”
It’s easier to measure a capital investment that helps a manufacturer produce more items within a given period of time, Alexander Davis, deputy CFO of Pie Insurance, told CFO Brew. It’s more difficult to show ROI when the investment has less tangible outcomes, like when AI helps eliminate risk of making an error in an earnings report or a material misstatement in a financial statement.
“How do you measure that? That is a really difficult question to answer,” Davis said. “We recognize that those benefits are there, and they get some type of qualitative weighting…We’re still learning how to measure that, and I think we’re still in general kind of growing up and maturing around how we view investments in AI.”
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Davis conceded that Pie Insurance doesn’t have a “mature framework” of measuring ROI around AI spending. But the benefits are still clear through reduced risk and time savings, he added.
“It will become important in time to measure cost versus that benefit, but right now we’re seeing a benefit, and I think there’s this feeling that it’s a worthwhile endeavor for us,” Davis continued.
It sure is a timesaver. It seems the easiest and best way organizations can measure AI’s benefit, at least for now, is by showing how much time it saves on tasks.
A recent Workiva survey of 2,300 corporate reporting professionals found that 88% of respondents “reported increases in ROI from AI usage in the last year.” The vast majority of respondents said AI saved them time and made them more productive.
“If I were a practitioner thinking about return on investment, I would be thinking about it in terms of hard dollar costs as well as time saved, and my opportunity cost there,” Steve Soter, VP and industry principal at Workiva, told us. “I suspect that the answer to this, in terms of ROI, lies largely in opportunity cost and time savings.”