Eventually, “is this impressive” stops being the question, and “did this pay for itself” starts being the only one that matters.
ROI as a formal management tool traces to a specific person and company: Frank Donaldson Brown, a DuPont engineer who in the 1910s–20s built what became known as the DuPont formula — breaking ROI down into profit margin multiplied by asset turnover, so that a falling return could be diagnosed as either a pricing problem or an efficiency problem, not just a vague decline. It became one of the first systematic tools for comparing the performance of different business units on a common basis, rather than by gut feel.
This essay’s closing line — “for businesses, return on investment, efficiency and ease of use and user interface that will matter eventually” — is making almost the same diagnostic point a century later: hype and demo-ability get an AI tool in the door, but ROI is the metric that decides whether it stays.
Source: Marek, P. (2009), “Not Very Known Author of Du Pont Model – Frank Donaldson Brown (1885–1965),” Český finanční a účetní časopis, 2009(2), 70–75. A regional business-history journal, not a landmark citation — the DuPont-formula origin story is genuinely under-documented in mainstream literature, and this was the most direct source found.