Why is it so hard to measure the ROI of enterprise AI?
Deploying enterprise AI tools often leads to high token consumption and low utilization without clear business value to show for it. Because the benefits and costs are so hard to measure, companies end up facing a reckoning where they drop their tools entirely rather than renewing them.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- The most recent one is from September 2026.
- This comes up 130.0× more often in r/salesforce than across the site as a whole.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1abandoning renewals for underperforming AI featuresDid this help you?
- 2relying on internal dev teams to build alternative custom solutions at a fraction of the costDid this help you?
- 3Running small-scale split tests with a percentage of enrolled contacts before rolling features out to 100%Did this help you?
- 4Manually previewing the messiest contacts and deselecting certain unreliable data sourcesDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“why is achieving the benefits of a working Agentforce implementation so hard, and why are those benefits and associated costs so hard to measure?”source ↗
“CIOs and CFOs around the world are facing a reckoning for allowing their employees to recklessly consume tokens with no ROI to show for it.”source ↗
“The utilization was not good so we're not renewing.”source ↗
“At these volumes one extra click swings the result, so I'd like to see whether either metric holds up once the numbers mean something.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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- 3How to choose an AI customer support agent for real use cases
- 3Is enterprise software support actually worth the cost for small teams?
- 3How do you know if wellness programs actually work?
- 3Can AI tools categorize high-volume bookkeeping transactions?
- 3How to decide who gets access to workplace AI tools