Guide

The ROI of AI in the workplace — for Caribbean SMBs.

Most AI investments are evaluated like software purchases. They should be evaluated like change programs. Here is the framework we use with owners and CFOs across Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands.

Tool cost is the smallest line item

A Copilot or ChatGPT seat is roughly US$20–30 per user, per month. For a 50-person Caribbean SMB that is about US$15,000 a year — meaningful, but not the number that decides whether AI works.

The number that matters is how many minutes per employee per day shift from low-leverage to high-leverage work. At even 15 minutes a day across 50 employees, you recover roughly 3,000 hours a year. Priced at a conservative US$25 blended loaded rate, that is US$75,000 — five times the licence spend.

Behavior change is the multiplier

The reason most rollouts under-deliver is not the model — it is that people default to the workflow they already know. The compounding return comes from coaching the new behavior until it is the only behavior. That is the entire premise of our platform.

Three behavior metrics predict ROI better than completion certificates:

  • Active prompts per user per week. Not logins. Not page views. Real, task-attached prompts.
  • Time-to-first-shipped artifact. How long from "I learned this" to "I shipped a brief, report, email, or model with AI"?
  • Repeat-use rate per workflow. Did the same employee come back to the same use case in week two?

A CFO-ready ROI formula

We size every engagement against the same four-variable model:

Annual ROI = (minutes saved/employee/day × 250 working days × headcount × loaded rate per minute) − (licence cost + enablement cost)

The behavior loop pushes the first term up. Picking the right tools and tiers keeps the second term contained. Both halves matter.

Caribbean-specific cost considerations

Regional realities change the math in ways global templates miss:

  • Loaded rates differ by territory. A loaded hour in Bermuda is materially different from one in Jamaica or T&T. The ROI framework needs per-territory rates, not a single US blended number.
  • Data residency and compliance overhead. Jamaica DPA 2020, Bermuda PIPA, Cayman DPL, T&T DPA, and Barbados DPA each carry compliance work. Skipping that line item makes the ROI look better than it is.
  • FX and tier pricing. Per-seat enterprise tiers sold in USD compound on small SMB headcounts. Mid-tier products with predictable per-seat pricing usually beat enterprise bundles for 10–250 employee orgs.
  • Connectivity reality. In-flow coaching has to degrade gracefully when bandwidth drops. Asynchronous nudges and offline-friendly drills are not a luxury here.

What to measure in the first 90 days

  1. Days 1–30: diagnostic, role-specific pathway assignment, weekly active prompt rate.
  2. Days 31–60: first shipped artifact per employee, repeat-use rate by workflow, time saved per task.
  3. Days 61–90: CFO roll-up — hours saved, dollars saved, adoption by department, top 5 expanding workflows.

If you can produce those three reports on schedule, your AI program is working. If you cannot, no licence count will rescue the ROI.