Designing measurement frameworks that translate token spend, cycle-time savings, and quality lift into defensible P&L impact. By 2026, CFOs require attribution
Measuring AI ROI is the credibility skill: setting baselines before deployment, instrumenting usage and outcomes, attributing value conservatively, and reporting in CFO-grade language, the discipline that separates funded programs from the pilot graveyard.
Universal pull: every AI budget now demands evidence, and practitioners who deliver defensible value measurement gain unusual influence over portfolio decisions at every level.
No baseline, optimistic attribution, and time-savings valued without redeployment evidence. Fixing those three, measured before-state, conservative causality, outcome-linked hours, survives any CFO review.
Before deployment: the baseline is the irreplaceable artifact. Programs that instrument from day zero report value; programs that reconstruct it later report estimates.