Mark Margolis

Last week I shared perspectives on how building a Business Value Framework can provide a clear, consistent and agreed upon financial basis to accelerate investments for your solution. Today I thought I’d share a bit more about the typical return on investment (ROI) profiles that we see in the industry. Many years ago I attended a conference that shared something similar to the slide below. I’ve recently added to it in order to account for some of the more recent technology trends, namely. Generative AI and Agentic AI.

The slide above shows three examples:

• Internet of Things: The example here is that you can see some quick return on investment before it flattens out
• Application Protocol Interfaces (aka the API economy): Whereas the API economy / business platforms require significant investment of time and technology before you start to see significant returns
• AI: Similarly AI or specifically traditional AI as we have thought about it until relatively recently can provide reasonable returns before we see more exponential growth

I could write a great deal more on each of these areas. I am particularly fascinated about how each of these is disrupting value chains and creating opportunities for new business models which is why we see exponential growth. For now however I am going to keep this simple and focussed on the typical ROI profiles.

This second slide shows how we see Generative AI and Agentic AI providing different ROI.

• Gen AI: Gen AI (think Copilot) is easy to deploy and provides very quick ROI specially around productivity, efficiency as well as growth over the longer term
• Agentic AI: Requires more effort in the short term but provides and will continue to provide exponential growth for organisations in terms of cost / process optimisation as well huge opportunities for efficiency and growth

Wherever you are on your journey not only do you want a clear understanding of the returns of value but it also helps to understand the typical ROI profiles that you might expect to see. I hope the above helps. You may also find this article useful in the context of my other related articles such as:

• A Simple Value Framework
• AI Assessment Framework

When building your AI / Gen AI / Agentic AI strategy then you’ll want to map your opportunities against your Innovation/AI Strategy roadmap. An example pf this is below and you read more here:

The PowerPoint deck for the above images are here:

Thank you!