A New Cousin of ROI – Return on Information

In 1914, Edward Bernays was 23 years old, Charlie Chaplin was making his film debut and the business world was thinking through a new model that would transform business for the next century.

DuPont was shifting from gunpowder manufacturing to an industrial model when it came up with an explosive model called return on investment (ROI). The concept of ROI is driven by a simple question.

“Are we getting enough value for what we put in?” or as DuPont’s financial team was wondering, “how do we systematically compare results across the entire company?”

Tangible assets have always been ripe for analysis. Manufacturing plants, inventory, and other physical assets. Softer variables have been equally difficult to decipher, such as brand equity, employee engagement or customer experience.

Nevertheless, the ability of the ROI model to show value or lack of it led to generations of leaders repeating behaviors and making decisions, leading to deeply entrenched beliefs that are embedded in our minds about how to achieve value.

And then along came AI.

One hundred and eleven years later, we can now imagine a cousin of AI that will sit right alongside the original model and challenge how we measure value. We are calling it “return on information.”

Precision/volume x decisions/outcomes = return on information

The applications of AI enable technology to become a mirror of our own brain and our organization’s intelligence, such as:

• It will lead to a “soft” infrastructure that centers on our ability to identify the right questions for each inflection point of a product’s journey with differences by level of employee.
• It will lead to an emphasis on obtaining information, in advance, so decisions can be made in minutes that took months.
• It will lead to a streamlined decision-architecture to scale products and services rather than being driven by a too-often bureaucratic organizational structure.
• It will lead to a different type of programming where leaders think through every square inch of their enterprise, anticipate its needs, and prepare AI to be supportive and then learn from there.
• Decisions will not be constrained by organizational hierarchy, which will lead to the identification of pockets of value where our past habits are constraining growth.
• It will be measured by our ability to be more precise and to improve our decision making, leading to outcomes that create more value for our organization and our customers.
• Our desire to achieve the highest-level return on information will influence the financial models measuring return on investment.Communications leaders, just like C-Suite leaders of all types, will need to reinvent how they run their function.
• The leaders will realize that the noise of thousands of new AI apps being created each month is a sign of progress, but not a reason for distraction. Our ability to teach AI how to support our function and organization will be the key to our success.

Let’s imagine a few ways these changes will manifest.

Identifying the Right Questions – every employee will benefit by a prompt showing them the most important questions to answer as they engage in an important task. Imagine you are charged with designing a new clinical trial for breast cancer. As you sit down, AI is showing you the most important questions to ask each step of the way. Now, imagine doing this across a company of 100,000 people for any repeatable decision. Not scary for AI. Just in need of our brainpower to get it started.

Preparing for Decisions – if we think of what we need to develop answers to questions over several months, why not improve how we gather the same information, prepare a special “data puddle” for these types of decisions and let a question trigger AI to deliver the answer in seconds. The only issues for us are building the puddles and getting over the fact that months of work no longer are required for every effort.

Extending Our Brains – this is how to think of the shift from listening to intelligence. If you are interested in knowing what is happening across 1500 vendors in your global supply chain or understanding if issue x is being discussed in one of 75 languages you track, then that is what you should get. Valuable intelligence is personalized to your exact needs and their timing. AI and, in particular, agents, will continually learn and adapt to your needs.

Expand Innovation – if you are working in Brazil and your boss is in New Jersey, you are not likely to share a new idea, unless you can articulate that idea, have it translated and then put into a presentation format desired by the company. Many great ideas never get off the ground due to our internal roadblocks. Remove language, culture and style and see what you find.

Return on information will increasingly drive our return on investment models. We will realize how much value is locked up in our organizations that can be unleashed on the next problem or product launch. Technology will continue advancing at its rapid pace. Organizations that realize our biggest obstacle to unlocking AI is ourselves and our ingrained habits, will build advantage.

Our new ROI cousin will help us unlock what we cannot see today one problem or opportunity at a time.