AI ROI calculator
AI ROI calculator
Most AI budgets are spent building bets that never pay off. This calculator estimates how much capital you save by validating every bet with evidence first, and only funding the winners.
The short answer
An AI ROI calculator estimates the return on your AI spend by comparing funding every project up front against pretotyping each one cheaply and building only the bets the evidence supports. The gap between those two numbers is the capital you stop wasting.
Your AI portfolio
Industry evidence anchors the default assumptions: RAND puts the AI project failure rate above 80%, so roughly 1 in 5 bets pays off. A pretotype typically costs a small fraction of a full build.
Estimated capital saved
$7.9M
by pretotyping every bet and building only the ones the evidence supports.
This is a directional estimate for planning, not a guarantee. It assumes you pretotype every candidate bet and then fully fund only those that clear your evidence bar. Your actual results depend on your portfolio, build costs, and win rate.
How the math works
The traditional approach funds every promising AI bet to completion, then discovers a year later that most never moved the P&L. RAND puts the AI project failure rate above 80%, so the majority of that build spend is lost.
The pretotyping approach flips the order. For a small fraction of the build cost, you run a fast behavioural test on every candidate bet, then commit the full build budget only to the ones with real evidence of demand and payoff. You still pay to learn, but you stop paying to build losers. What you save is the money that would have gone into the bets that were never going to pay off.
An AI Bets Audit turns this estimate into a defensible, bet-by-bet number for your portfolio, with a fund / fix / kill call on each.
FAQ
AI ROI calculator: FAQ
What is an AI ROI calculator?+
It is a tool that estimates the return on your AI spend by comparing funding every AI project up front against validating each one cheaply first and building only the ones with evidence. It turns failure-rate assumptions into an estimated capital saving.
How do you calculate ROI on AI projects?+
Compare the total cost of building every candidate bet against the cost of pretotyping each bet for a small fraction of the build price and then fully funding only the ones that pay off. The difference, minus the pretotyping cost, is the capital you avoid wasting on bets that would have failed.
What assumptions does the calculator use?+
The defaults are anchored to public research: RAND finds more than 80% of AI projects fail, so roughly one in five bets pays off, and a pretotype typically costs a small share of a full build. You can adjust every input to match your own portfolio.
Is the AI ROI estimate a guarantee?+
No. It is a directional planning estimate. Actual results depend on your portfolio size, build costs, and win rate. The AI Bets Audit produces a defensible, evidence-based figure for your specific bets.
Map your AI bets
Turn this estimate into a bet-by-bet funding decision.
We're opening a limited number of private AI Bets Audits. Bring your AI spend; leave with a board-ready call on what to fund, fix, and kill.