Field notes · August 9, 2026 · 1 min read
How to measure the ROI of operational AI
The Wrong Metrics
Many companies are distracted by vanity metrics like 'AI adoption rate' or 'prompts per user.' These tell you nothing about the health of your operations.
The Right Metrics
When we deploy a Minimum Evolvable Product (MEP), we track one thing: Hours of manual, repetitive work eliminated. If a team used to spend 15 hours a week reformatting PDFs, and now they spend 2 hours reviewing AI-formatted data, that is a 13-hour hard ROI. Everything else is noise.