The ROI on Generative AI: Real-World Impact in Enterprise

The AI landscape is marked by stark contrasts. While some experts debate how soon we’ll achieve Artificial General Intelligence, others remain skeptical of AI’s current real-world impact. Despite massive investments across the AI stack, critics argue that tangible results often seem elusive.

At Social Gains, we’re cutting through the noise to explore how large enterprises are seeing actual, tangible ROI from Generative AI. Based on recent earnings calls, here are some of the most promising areas where AI is delivering measurable results:

1. Customer Support

Customer support is one of the areas showing the most uptake and early results from Generative AI.

Klarna has leveraged AI to dramatically improve their customer support capabilities. Their AI assistant has taken over the work of 700 employees, reducing resolution times from 11 minutes to just 2 minutes while maintaining high customer satisfaction levels.

Salesforce’s Agentforce platform is also showing real ROI for early customers. One client, Wiley, reported a “double-digit percentage increase in customer satisfaction and deflection rate compared to older technologies.” Wiley has already seen a 50% increase in case resolution with Agentforce’s first generation. The second generation is achieving 90% case resolution for customers like Royal Bank of Canada and ADP.

Even tech giants are seeing massive savings. Microsoft casually mentioned they expect to save hundreds of millions of dollars a year on call centers after adopting Generative AI.

2. Software Engineering

Software engineering has been another area of heavy adoption, with AI tools significantly boosting productivity. While concerns about AI replacing engineers are overblown, the productivity gains are undeniable.

Amazon shared a striking example of measurable benefits from their software development assistant Q. During a recent code migration task, Q saved Amazon over 4,500 developer years and $260 million compared to traditional methods.

As Amazon’s leadership noted: “That’s the game changer. And think about how this Q transformation capability might evolve to address other elusive but highly desired migrations.”

3. Customer Experience

Generative AI is also being used to radically improve customer experiences or change the economics of serving customers.

eBay launched a new AI-assisted selling flow for apparel in the UK, resulting in a 20-point increase in customer satisfaction, significantly reduced listing times, and an increase in listings and sold items per seller.

YUM Brands is enhancing drive-through experiences at Taco Bell with voice AI technology. The results have been so promising that they’ve accelerated the rollout, with plans to scale to several hundred stores by year-end. Early tests have shown consistent consumer experiences and higher team member productivity.

4. Sales

In the sales world, AI is helping account executives perform better and may eventually take on AE roles directly. Manulife offers a compelling example of AI boosting sales effectiveness.

Manulife is using AI to assist salespeople in recommending better products to clients and personalizing the retirement planning process. Early results are promising:

• 68% of agents used the new GenAI capabilities in the first 2 weeks
• They anticipate a 17% increase in repurchase rates when fully rolled out
• At minimum, they expect a 5% increase in APE sales impact across their businesses

5. Operational Processes

AI models are proving highly effective at digitizing and automating paper processes and tedious data entry work. Several companies are already seeing significant ROI in this area:

Rocket Mortgage is using AI to automate the transcription of client calls and complete mortgage applications. This has drastically improved banker productivity:

• Over 300,000 detailed call transcripts generated weekly
• Support for over 100 data points on mortgage applications
• Tens of millions of data fields automated weekly

Walmart has used generative AI to enhance its product catalog, improving over 850 million pieces of data. This initiative has significantly reduced manual effort and enhanced the customer experience by providing more accurate product information.

Mastercard is leveraging Generative AI advances to enhance fraud detection, achieving a 20% increase in accuracy on top of their existing AI capabilities.

Closing Thoughts

While many AI workloads are still experimental, there are clear signs that AI is hitting production and delivering real value across a wide range of functions. From enhancing customer support and engineering processes to improving sales strategies and operational workflows, AI is proving to be a powerful tool for driving efficiency and tangible ROI.

At Social Gains, we’re excited to see how companies continue to innovate with AI. As more organizations identify the key areas where AI delivers the most value, we expect to see an explosion of diverse, real-world AI applications. And we’re still in the early stages – models are improving rapidly, and the cost of AI-powered intelligence continues to decrease.

If you’re looking to stay ahead of the curve on AI strategy and implementation, join our community at Social Gains. We focus on practical tools and automations that are delivering results for businesses right now, without the hype or empty promises.