For CFOs
How do I know if our data and AI spend is paying off?
You know when you have a before number. Most companies never wrote one down, so there is nothing to compare the result against.
Start with the cost nobody budgets: the hours people spend fixing, checking and rebuilding what the data team already delivers. Price those hours at payroll rates and you have a baseline any return model can use.
The FTE Debt calculator. About five minutes, no sign-up.
What to look at first
Hours spent working around the data
Reports rebuilt in spreadsheets, figures rechecked before a meeting, cuts requested from an analyst. Count people, hours and loaded cost.
What the spend replaced
A purchase that replaced nothing adds cost. Name the manual work or the tool that should disappear, and by when.
A decision that changed
If nobody can name one decision made differently because of it, the return case is still a hope, not a number.
€930,000
a year of data work in one e-commerce company, once business hours were counted.
€611,000
of it could be stopped.
3 weeks
to measure it, from payroll rates and cloud bills.
One anonymized engagement.
The longer version: How do I know if our data and AI spend is paying off?