"Developers love Copilot" is not a board slide. After a year of AI tool rollouts, directors expect ROI: cost per shipped feature, adoption curves, and whether spend scales linearly with headcount.
Metrics that resonate with finance
- Cost per active developer — total AI tool spend ÷ developers using tools weekly
- Spend vs. budget — trailing 30-day burn with forecast to quarter-end
- Tool overlap cost — developers on both Cursor and Copilot without incremental output
- Model mix efficiency — share of spend on premium vs. economy models
Metrics that resonate with engineering
- PR cycle time before and after rollout (from existing Git metrics)
- Adoption rate by team and tenure cohort
- Incidents tied to AI-generated code (track separately—don't conflate)
Package the narrative
Combine spend dashboards with delivery signals your org already trusts. ForgeMeter's AI summaries are designed for exactly this: plain-language paragraphs a CTO can paste into a board deck, with underlying numbers finance can audit.
Get a baseline in one hour
Connect your stack at forgemeter.com, review the first monthly snapshot, and iterate on the metrics your board actually asks about—before the next budget cycle.