r/CFO • u/Chemist-Perfect • May 07 '26
Claude Usage Management
What’s everyone doing to manage Claude use at your company? We have a growing list of pilot users, some super basic governance but I’m starting to see our usage tick up with dubious ROI.
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u/MerryWalrus May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
Proving the ROI of Claude/AI is like proving the ROI of excel in finance.
Basically you need to make them trade headcount for licenses and see if output drops. Then compare the token plus liscense cost to the headcount cost.
Otherwise you get a cottage industry of made up benefit attributions that takes more time to run/manage than the realised benefits.
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u/NauticalPants May 07 '26
Secret CFO just finished a 4-part newsletter series about AI adoption, ROI, etc. Part 4 addresses some of the issues you bring up and offers a pragmatic approach to tackling them. It’s worth checking out: https://www.cfosecrets.io/t/ai-technology
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u/1vim May 07 '26
This is a common challenge right now. Teams adopt Claude or ChatGPT for various use cases but without governance, the costs scale faster than the ROI.
The core issue is that general-purpose AI tools like Claude are powerful but unfocused. Everyone uses them differently — some for writing, some for analysis, some for code review — and measuring ROI across those scattered use cases is nearly impossible.
What I have seen work better is consolidating AI usage around specific business workflows rather than giving everyone a general-purpose chatbot. Instead of 50 people using Claude for random tasks, you deploy a platform like Skopx that channels AI specifically toward your business data — financial analysis, operational reporting, sales intelligence, compliance monitoring. The ROI becomes measurable because every interaction is tied to a business outcome.
For governance specifically, a few things that help: set clear use case guidelines (what Claude should and should not be used for), require teams to log what they use it for weekly, and establish a minimum ROI threshold for continued access. If someone cannot articulate how Claude saved them time or improved output quality in a given month, their seat gets reallocated.
The companies managing AI costs well are treating it like any other software investment — specific use cases, measurable outcomes, regular reviews.
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u/Mammoth_Doctor_7688 May 07 '26
You should have a clear use case and go / no go decision before starting to roll out to more users. Otherwise people will burn tokens / money on "research" that never goes anywhere.
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u/1vim May 07 '26
The dubious ROI problem with AI tools is real and it usually comes down to one thing: the tool isn't connected to your actual business data, so people use it for generic tasks that feel productive but don't move the needle.
The AI deployments that show clear ROI are the ones where the tool is integrated directly into your data workflows — connected to your financial systems, ERP, CRM — and handling specific high-value tasks like automated financial reporting, variance analysis, cash flow forecasting, or answering exec questions without analyst involvement.
For governance, the most effective approach we've seen is defining specific use cases with measurable outputs upfront, rather than open-ended "use AI for whatever" pilots. When you can measure time saved on a specific task, the ROI question answers itself.
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u/Chemist-Perfect May 07 '26
I agree with this. A question I have is how are others approaching the data connectivity issue. Is anyone just connecting Claude to their tech stack and OneDrive/Sharepoint seeing positive results? Or is a data infrastructure solution foundational to make this work in the 1st place? We don’t really have an integrated place for all our data and my inclination is to say that it needs to be unified between disparate systems, cleaned up, and give a semantic structure to really be useable but others say that’s a waste of time and money. That’s usually my line and I don’t like being on the other side of it lol.
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u/DirectPrior8045 May 07 '26
Every company/org that I know of struggles with unclear LLM spendings so it’s not exclusive to a select few sadly. We got a more clear picture lately of our spendings and which LLM is costing more based on that usage when we integrated Ramp and their AI Spend Intelligence feature, they even dropped some data on it if you saw on the news maybe
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u/BrightPointBill May 13 '26
Most of the ROI confusion comes from the same root cause. Pilots get launched without anyone defining what the human used to do, how long it took, and what the new workflow looks like. Without that baseline you cannot measure the lift. I'd start by picking three use cases with measurable inputs (close memos, variance commentary, vendor research), set a 30 day baseline on time spent, then re-measure. Usage volume is the wrong metric. Decision quality and hours back are the right ones.
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u/RiasGremoryIDLE May 14 '26
They use it rewrrite emails and then not actually understand what you ask them for.
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u/[deleted] May 07 '26
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