For AI, the ROI question is about what works—and what doesn’t

Everyone’s talking about AI, as organizations of all sizes invest in the technology—but where does ROI fit in?

It depends. Big companies and investors think it might take some time for their AI investments to pay off. Dallas Dolen, a technology principal with PwC, told IT Brew in January that he believes 2030 is a realistic target for the benefits of AI integration to hit the market.

But that doesn’t mean Dolen is bearish on the overall AI payoff. He said that he believes at some point soon, likely after the midway point of the year, AI’s efficiency advantages will show impact—both positive and negative.

“We’re going to have a lot of clarity in 2026 around that,” Dolen said. “Sometimes just knowing where things are going is better than not knowing at all.”

Hardened up. Part of that is understanding the role of “soft ROI,” success that is harder to explain than strict budgetary benefits to the bottom line. Jason McKay, RapidScale CPO, told IT Brew that while AI is being utilized successfully by IT pros, the overall ROI is hard to measure.

“The teams that are effectively leveraging AI to do the jobs that they already have to help assist them in those jobs are getting major benefits in terms of quality and speed of delivery,” McKay said.

Productivity gains are a boon to IT managers and other C-suite leaders who need to be looking for the benefits of ROI. For engineers, those gains can be significant, said Appfire Director of Engineering Surya Mereddy, though there’s reason to be hesitant as well. Vibe-coding opportunities can be offset by potential bottlenecks caused by out-of-date infrastructure.

Another hurdle is employee toil—which AI can lessen in part by triaging customer service needs.

“We are also thinking about how we can leverage AI and create this agentic future that will also help us return on investment for how we do engineering as practice,” Mereddey said.

Talk, but not cheap. Starting the ROI discussion with the C-suite is important. McKay said he sees easing leadership’s fears about AI—and convincing them to deploy it responsibly—as good first steps to integrating the technology into your organization.

That doesn’t mean the ROI conversation is all positive. Some trepidation is important, especially when it comes to security.

“There’s a risk element that those leaders need to be aware of, there are corporate concerns about data leakage and things like that they need to be careful about,” McKay said.