Brian Solis Reframes ROI as Return on Intelligence
Brian Solis, ServiceNow's head of global innovation, argued in a June 29, 2026 essay that enterprises have entered an era of AI Darwinism, where organizations that adapt and learn fastest gain advantage over those that treat AI purely as a cost-cutting tool. For AI/DS practitioners, the piece proposes reframing ROI as "Return on Intelligence": weighing learning, augmentation, and new-capability creation alongside traditional cost savings when evaluating AI investments. Solis contrasts automation, which he says optimizes existing processes, with augmentation, which expands what teams can do, and cites ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott's comments about removing "soul crushing" work from jobs to illustrate automation's legitimate but limited role. The essay is strategic framing rather than new technical results, but it offers a lens practitioners can use to justify augmentation-focused AI investments to finance and leadership.
For AI/DS teams, the practical takeaway from Brian Solis's essay is that ROI dashboards built solely on cost reduction may undercount an AI initiative's real value. Treating metrics like learning velocity, decision-support quality, and newly enabled capabilities as first-class ROI inputs, not just automation's labor savings, changes how projects get prioritized and how teams justify infrastructure and tooling spend.
What happened
Solis, ServiceNow's head of global innovation, published an essay titled "In an Era of AI Darwinism, ROI Now Represents Return on Intelligence" on his personal site on June 29, 2026. He frames the current competitive moment as AI Darwinism, arguing that organizations which adapt and learn fastest will outcompete those fixated on near-term cost-cutting. According to Solis, automation can remove genuine drudgery from work but becomes a liability when treated as a company's entire AI strategy, since it optimizes yesterday's processes rather than creating new value. The essay cites ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott's public comments that companies should target automation at what McDermott has called "soul crushing" work, using the remark to argue automation has a legitimate but bounded role alongside augmentation.
Industry context
Solis's automation-versus-augmentation framing echoes a broader shift in vendor and analyst messaging toward human-plus-AI workflows rather than pure headcount-reduction narratives. Enterprise software vendors, including ServiceNow, have increasingly marketed AI platforms around augmenting employee capability rather than replacing roles outright, a positioning this essay reinforces from a ServiceNow executive's vantage point.
For practitioners
Teams evaluating AI tooling can use this framing to track two distinct metric families: operational metrics such as throughput, error rate, and cost-per-transaction for automation projects, and enabling metrics such as time-to-insight, knowledge retention, and rate of new use-case discovery for augmentation projects. Making the distinction explicit in project proposals may help secure budget for initiatives whose value is not purely cost-driven.
What to watch
- •Whether product and analytics teams begin reporting learning-centric KPIs alongside cost metrics.
- •Whether finance and procurement functions accept non-cost ROI justifications when approving AI platform spend.
- •Whether ServiceNow's own product messaging and roadmap reflect this augmentation-first framing in coming quarters.
Editorial analysis
As a single-author essay from a vendor executive, this piece is best read as strategic framing intended to shape how leaders discuss AI ROI, not as an empirical study. Its arguments are consistent with a wider industry trend away from pure cost-cutting narratives, but readers should note Solis writes from ServiceNow's institutional interest in augmentation-oriented products.
Key Points
- 1Brian Solis's June 29, 2026 essay proposes replacing pure cost-savings ROI with "Return on Intelligence," which values learning and new-capability creation.
- 2Automation optimizes existing processes while augmentation expands what teams can do, requiring different KPIs and redesigned workflows to capture value.
- 3Practitioners can use the framing to justify AI investments to finance by tracking enabling metrics like time-to-insight alongside operational cost metrics.
Scoring Rationale
This is a single-author strategic essay from a ServiceNow executive that offers a useful framing for practitioners evaluating AI ROI, but it presents no new technical results, data, or major industry announcement. Impact is modest and consistent with prior scoring; held at 6.1 given genuine practitioner relevance balanced against its opinion/thought-leadership nature.
Sources
Primary source and supporting public references used for this report.
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