Free Tool
AI Project ROI Calculator
Show a client's leadership the business case before they ask for it. Input capacity gains and costs, generate a CFO-ready report your team can present in minutes.
Project Information
Basic details about your AI transformation project
Time Savings
Estimate the time your client will save with AI automation
Total hours saved per time period
How often these hours are saved
Client's internal cost per hour (salary + benefits + overhead)
How many months ahead to calculate financial impact
Software Cost Savings (Monthly)
What existing software costs can you eliminate or reduce with AI?
Tools you can replace: chatbots, analytics tools, automation platforms
Downgrade expensive tools to cheaper tiers due to AI efficiency
New AI Platform Costs (Monthly)
What new AI-related costs will you incur?
Monthly cost for AI platforms (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic)
Additional cloud storage, vector databases, and infrastructure
AI-Specific Costs (Monthly)
Ongoing AI model and data costs
Monthly LLM token usage costs (GPT-4, Claude, etc.)
Costs for training custom models or fine-tuning
Implementation Costs (One-time)
Upfront investment to get AI systems running
Your consulting fees for the AI transformation project
Client's internal team time for implementation
One-time data cleaning, labeling, and preparation costs
Employee training and change management costs
Ongoing Costs (Monthly)
Recurring costs to maintain and improve AI systems
Monthly maintenance and technical support costs
Ongoing optimization and improvement costs
Ready to Calculate ROI
Fill out the form to see your project's return on investment
Turn This ROI Into Reality
You've seen the numbers. Now deliver discoveries that prove this ROI to a client's leadership. Audity systematizes the structured diagnostic workflow so your firm can close deals with confidence.
Built for boutique AI consulting firms
Disclaimer: This calculator is provided for informational and demonstration purposes only. Results are estimates based on user inputs and general assumptions, and should not be considered financial or professional advice. Users are responsible for conducting their own research and validating all outputs before making business decisions. RAC Projects Group, LLC makes no warranties regarding accuracy and assumes no liability for outcomes resulting from use of this tool.
How to Calculate AI Project ROI
The core formula is the same one used for any investment:
ROI (%) = (Annual Benefit − Annual Cost) ÷ Annual Cost × 100
What makes AI projects different is where the benefit comes from. For most workflow and automation projects, the dominant benefit is capacity: hours a client's team stops spending on a task, valued at the loaded hourly rate of the people doing it. Revenue lift and avoided costs come second. The cost side combines one-time implementation, recurring licensing, and the maintenance nobody budgets for.
A worked example
A client's team spends 25 hours per week on manual document review at a loaded cost of $85/hour. An AI-assisted workflow cuts that time by 50%. The project costs $30,000 to implement plus $800/month to run.
- Annual benefit: 25 hrs × 50% × $85 × 52 weeks = $55,250
- Annual cost (year one): $30,000 + ($800 × 12) = $39,600
- Year-one ROI: ($55,250 − $39,600) ÷ $39,600 = ~40%
- Payback period: $39,600 ÷ ($55,250 ÷ 12) ≈ 8.6 months
Year two looks very different: the implementation cost is gone, so the same benefit against $9,600 of running cost is roughly 475% ROI. Always show both years. A year-one number alone undersells the project; a steady-state number alone oversells it.
What is a good AI project ROI?
For capacity-gain and automation projects, a defensible first-year target is 100-300% ROI with a payback period under 12 months. Anything promising 10x in year one usually means the cost side is missing change management, data prep, and maintenance.
The two assumptions that decide whether your number is credible
Every AI ROI projection lives or dies on the efficiency gain and the loaded rate. Use a conservative gain (30-60% for most automation, not the 90% a vendor demo suggests) and the fully loaded employee cost, not base salary. The calculator above applies this structure for you and exports the result as a client-ready PDF report.
Frequently asked questions
More free tools for your discovery engagements
- AI Audit Pricing Calculator: price the discovery before you show the upside.
- AI Use-Case Scorecard: prioritize which use-cases to put in front of the client.
- Diagnostic to Pipeline: turn discovery findings into a proposal and pipeline.
- For boutique AI consulting teams: how the platform runs discovery once your firm closes.
The ROI number is the easy part. The engagement is the hard part.
A standalone ROI figure rarely closes a deal on its own. What does is the ROI tied to a scored readiness assessment, prioritized opportunities, and a client-ready deliverable. Audity ships that whole engagement for boutique consulting firms, so the projection arrives inside the diagnostic your client funds.