Your ROI Number Is in the Wrong Language

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0600

Every AI business case someone hands me starts the same way. A number gets picked before anyone’s agreed on what the number is supposed to represent. Revenue? Cost avoided? A risk the company no longer has to carry? Nobody’s agreed, yet the number got picked anyway.

Like most product or technology ventures, what “good” is needs to be defined by someone and rarely can be inherited.

The math is genuinely different every time. Whether it’s different cost structures, different appetite for a multi-year payback, or something else, what’s constant isn’t the formula. It’s the discipline underneath it, and that discipline has three steps I keep seeing skipped everywhere, from business cases to Reddit.

Business-Case on David R. Longnecker - Converting Coffee to Code

Your ROI Number Is in the Wrong Language