What’s the real ROI of video?

Video has always promised something powerful at work: connection. Seeing a face, hearing a voice, and feeling like there’s a real human on the other side of the screen changes how messages land. It replaces guessing with understanding and gives communication a heartbeat.

Yet most companies still find it difficult to quantify the ROI of video. Not because video doesn’t work, but because it hasn’t been practical to scale. Recording takes time. Personalization takes effort. As teams grow and calendars fill up, consistency breaks down.

So async video gets reserved for a handful of high-stakes moments, while the rest of the revenue funnel runs on text-heavy workflows that look like communication but don’t feel like much of…anything.

At Vidyard, we wanted to find out what happens when showing up on video is baseline. 

Small moments of disconnection add up to major revenue gaps

Sales and marketing have always been about human connection. Making your customer feel something. Earning their trust. So it stands to reason that most revenue teams struggle because delivering that humanity at scale is hard.

People register for webinars but don’t attend. Reps want to reach out personally but can’t keep up. Prospects book meetings and then quietly disappear. None of these moments feel dramatic, but each one introduces distance. And distance erodes trust.

Trust used to be built in hallways, over coffee, and in the moments between meetings. Today, we’re trying to build it through pixels. That makes presence simultaneously more valuable and harder to sustain.

We built Video Agent to address that tension, applying AI-powered workflows to automatically generate and send personalized video messages using AI Avatars, triggered by real buyer and seller actions. The breakthrough isn’t just video itself. It’s removing the friction of consistent and personalized video creation.

Since embedding it across our revenue motion, here’s what we’ve learned.

Webinar ROI: Converting intent into engagement

Webinar attendance is notoriously unpredictable. At Vidyard, we consistently saw strong reg numbers followed by a live attendance rate between 30-40%. That gap meant fewer engaged conversations and less downstream impact.

Instead of sending another generic reminder email, we used Video Agent to automatically send a short, personalized video 24 hours ahead of time. Each message addressed the registrant by name, re-centered the value of the session, and reminded them why it was worth showing up.

Attendance jumped to nearly 50%.

All of the content remained the same, but our approach to nudging registrants changed. It stopped sounding like a system notification and started feeling like a warm invite.

The insight here is simple: video collapsed distance at the moment where demand (and intent) already existed.

 

Prospecting ROI: Building connection without burnout

Customers tell me all the time how valuable personalized video prospecting is because it builds trust quickly. But for years it came with a huge energy tax. Reps exhausted themselves recording nearly identical videos, trying to show up as real people while juggling full calendars, and inevitably they lost steam.

With Video Agent, that dynamic changed. We empowered our own reps to focus on understanding the prospect, crafting the right message, and setting clear intent then used AI to create and send the video for them.

The result was both human and measurable. Reps reclaimed more than 40 hours per month. At the same time, Sales Accepted Leads increased by over 100 per month, translating into more than $100K in new monthly revenue.

In this example, AI doesn’t replace the rep, it extends them and allows their best intent to travel farther than the limits of their calendar.

 

No-show ROI: Protecting moments that matter

Even after a meeting is booked, trust is still fragile. No-shows waste time, stall momentum, and quietly drain pipeline. At Vidyard, our no-show rate sat at 13%. Respectable, but still costly when every meeting represents a real chance to move a relationship forward.

We used Video Agent to automatically send a personalized video confirmation immediately after a meeting was booked. Prospects got to see the SDR they’d be meeting, hear what the call would cover, and feel a sense of presence before the conversation ever happened.

No-show rates dropped down to 9%—a 33% reduction.

These aren’t hypothetical improvements. They’re real conversations that no longer disappear because the relationship feels real sooner.

 

The compounded ROI of AI-powered video

Individually, each of these gains matters. Together, they compound.

More people show up. More conversations happen. More opportunities move forward. When video is powered by AI, presence becomes consistent instead of occasional, and trust scales without adding work.

From this perspective, video is more than just a format or a tactic – it’s the infrastructure for connection.

When connection scales, revenue follows

By removing the manual effort behind creating and sending video, tools like Video Agent make human presence repeatable at scale. What used to be limited by time and energy can now show up consistently across marketing and sales, scaling connection and compounding trust. 

What we’ve learned is that the ROI of video is anything but abstract. It shows up when connection stops being occasional and starts being consistent. When showing up on video becomes table stakes, trust becomes measurable, growth becomes repeatable, and teams win.