Prove the ROI of AI before leaders ask
Comms teams struggle to track results. Build your scorecard around these four KPIs to change that.
Stephanie Nivinskus is principal, Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy.
If you ask your team to report on the ROI that AI delivered last quarter, expect a long pause before you get an answer.
Nearly all of the more than 200 communicators that completed the AI Readiness Assessment have moved past experimenting with AI, but only 22% can show documented improvement or return on investment.
Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy built the assessment with Samantha Stark, Phyusion’s founder and chief strategist and a Center advisor, who presented the findings during the October Center member call. Measurement got the lowest score of the eight areas of AI adoption, and 53% of teams reported having no AI metrics defined at all.
Treat that 53% as a red flag for your 2027 budget. If you cannot show a return on the tools your company already paid for, your next request for training or new technology will fall on deaf ears. Stark recommended tracking a handful of KPIs, and the four below cover the categories she named.
- Hours saved: the number finance checks first
A stopwatch on every deliverable signals to many teams that job cuts are coming, and your leadership team will want the figure anyway. Stark was direct about why: “You do need to measure efficiency, because that’s what CFOs and CEOs care about.”
Action step: Clock your highest volume deliverables now. Record how long each one takes with AI, then compare it against how long the same work took before, using past project timelines or your team’s best estimate.
- Engagement rates: proof speed improved the content
A draft finished in half the time means nothing if fewer people read it.
Action step: Compare current results against your pre-AI baseline. Pull LinkedIn shares or internal newsletter open rates from the six months before your team started using AI on that channel, then track AI-assisted pieces against that line monthly.
- Sentiment scores: a read on whether adoption will last
Job satisfaction tells you whether people experience AI as support or as surveillance, and that answer predicts usage after the rollout ends.
Action step: Add two AI questions to your next pulse survey. Ask whether AI has made the day-to-day more rewarding and whether people have the training they want to use it well. Repeat the same pair every quarter so you have a trend to report.
- New formats: evidence your team is expanding its range
Video and design work sat outside many comms teams’ reach before AI. Projects people volunteer for belong here too, because a raised hand signals growing confidence.
Action step: Assign someone to log work your team could not produce a year ago. Update it monthly with the deliverable and the person who built it and pull from it whenever leaders ask what AI has changed.
Share results with your team, too
Send the scorecard to executives and to the people who did the work in the same week. One group gets a return it can fund, and the other sees what its effort produced.
Take the AI Readiness Assessment and include your team’s results so your leaders can see how you compare with the more than 200 teams already rated. When the ROI question comes, you will already have answered it in writing.
