How to find high-ROI use cases for AI in your business

Over 90% of AI projects fail.

Not because the technology sucks. But because executives are chasing shiny demos instead of solving real problems.

If you can’t articulate your AI project’s ROI in under 2 minutes, you’ve probably chosen the wrong problem.

At AE Studio, we’ve worked across dozens of verticals and hundreds of projects…

And developed a simple framework that consistently identifies high-impact AI opportunities: The PAIN Framework.

The PAIN Framework

We’ve helped clients generate millions in revenue by focusing on the right problems first.

• P - Pain Points

• A - Automation Fit

• I - Impact

• N - Necessities

Let’s break down each PAIN factor:

P: Find the Real Pain Points

This is step zero. Skip this, and your project will fail.

Talk to your people. Look at your workflows. Ask: “What really sucks about our day-to-day operations?”

If you can’t find painful parts in your workflow, congratulations, you have an awesome business. But for everyone else, look at these red flags:

• High turnaround times on routine tasks

• Excessive hours spent on repetitive work

• High error rates (especially costly in regulated industries)

Make a list. The pain should be obvious to anyone doing the work!

Rate your project 1-5 based on how much this problem truly hurts your business daily. If people actively complain about it or it causes visible delays/errors, score it higher.

A: Check for Automation Fit

Go through your pain points and ask: “Is this repetitive, boring work that happens every day?”

If someone says, “Ugh, this takes forever and I’m just clicking through screens without using my brain,” that’s perfect for AI.

But if the pain involves complex human interaction or creative problem-solving, make sure you keep a human in the loop. 

Remember: not everything needs to be completely automated.

Give a score of 1-5 based on how repetitive and rule-based the work is. “Mindless clicking” scores 5, whereas complex creative work will be closer to 1.

I: Calculate the Impact (ROI)

This is where most teams get stuck, but the math is straightforward. (Don’t worry about having a perfect formula, a simple one is better than nothing. Don’t skip this!)

Total Cost = Hours per task × Hourly cost x Frequency 

Example: Document processing takes 1 hour per document, costs $50/hour in salary per employee, done 12,000 times per year = $600,000 annual cost.

If automation costs $250,000 to build, your ROI is massive.

Rule of thumb: If your project breaks even in under 6 months, you’ve found gold. If not, don’t write it off just yet. You still might have a good project!

Score impact from 1-5 based on your ROI calculation. Break-even under 6 months gets a 5, break-even after multiple years gets a lower score.

N: Check Your Necessities

Do you have what you need to succeed?

• Clear ownership: Someone needs to champion this project

• Process documentation: You need to know what “good” looks like

• Data availability: Can you access the inputs and define the outputs?

• Legal clearance: Any regulatory roadblocks? (Critical for healthcare/finance)

Rate 1-5 based on how many necessities you have in place.

The more you have covered, the higher the score. If you’re missing multiple key pieces, score closer to a 1 or 2.

Real Examples from the Trenches

The Proposal Problem

A client took 2 weeks to generate proposals for customers. The process was repeatable (✔️Automation fit) and causing lost deals (✔️High impact). But they lacked the data infrastructure to aggregate proposal information.

In the end, we didn't build anything.

They saved thousands by identifying this roadblock early and pivoted to a project that actually worked.

The Invoice Ingestion Success

Another client needed to process hundreds of thousands of invoices annually.

Not super painful daily, but highly repetitive and massive in scale.

We built a solution in 8 weeks that delivered hundreds of thousands in ROI.

The $10M Subscription Solution

We identified a simple pain: unsubscribing from services sucks.

It was automatable, had massive market impact, and we had the right team.

We built a text-based unsubscription service and sold it for over $10 million.

How to Score Your Project Ideas With This Framework 👇

For each potential AI project, rate it 1-5 on all four PAIN factors:

• How deep is the pain? 

• How automatable is it?

• What’s the business impact?

• Do you have the necessities?

Most high-ROI projects will get a total score between 10 and 20 (the higher the better).

This scoring system guarantees that you pick projects with real value, instead of shiny (but ultimately unhelpful) AI demos.

The Bottom Line

The companies that succeed with AI focus on solving real problems that hurt businesses every day.

Use the PAIN framework to identify where AI can actually move the needle, not just impress stakeholders in demos.

Ready to find your highest-impact AI opportunities?

If you want help applying this framework to your specific business, our team can walk you through the process in a strategy session.

👉 Book a quick consultation here

We’ll help you identify your biggest pain points, calculate real ROI, and determine which projects are worth pursuing.

See you in the next edition of AE Studio Bytes! 🚀

— The AE Studio Team

P.S. To see some of our previous work, check out our best case studies here.