Nobody Ever Calculated the ROI of Email

Everyone is arguing about AI ROI right now. Boards want a number. Consultants are selling frameworks. And the headlines look brutal: an MIT report claimed 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots showed no measurable return, and a Forbes piece this January says 56% of CEOs see zero ROI from AI.

So AI is a bust, right?

Here is the thing. Ask any of those same companies to turn off email for a week. Just try it. Nobody ever ran a six month ROI study on email. Nobody had to. It became the way work happens, and the return stopped being a line item because it was everywhere.

I think AI is following the same path, and the data backs it up.

The gap between the pilot and the person

That same MIT report has a stat that got way less coverage than the 95% number: 90% of employees regularly use personal AI tools for work, while only 40% of companies have an official LLM subscription. Workers adopted it at more than twice the rate of their own employers. The report even found that 70% of workers prefer AI over a colleague for quick stuff like drafting emails and basic analysis.

So the official pilot fails its KPI review while the people inside the building are quietly using AI multiple times a day. That is not a failed technology. That is a measurement problem.

Worth noting: the 95% figure itself has been heavily criticized. It came from 52 interviews and a narrow definition of success. I would not build a strategy on that number in either direction.

Why the ROI is invisible

The value seems to be landing in the same place email's value landed: the unglamorous middle of the workday. Drafting the reply. Summarizing the thread. Turning messy notes into something you can send. None of that shows up as a new revenue line. It shows up as an hour you got back and immediately spent on something else.

You cannot easily measure that, but you can feel it. Take the tools away from a developer who has been using them for a year and watch what happens. People cannot imagine working without it anymore. That reaction is the ROI.

What I'd actually track

If you have to justify it, skip the moonshot pilot and count the boring stuff: time to first draft, time spent on status updates, how long the inbox takes in the morning. Small numbers, measured honestly, beat a big transformation deck every time.

Email never had a business case. It had users. AI is getting there the same way.

What's the one AI task you'd refuse to give back? Curious what it is for everyone else.