The number every agent ROI calculator hides
Hours saved times hourly rate is the easy arithmetic. The tasks your agent does not clear are the expensive ones, and almost nobody prices them before the contract is signed.
Ivo Marchetti
Almost every AI automation proposal contains the same sum. Hours saved, multiplied by a loaded hourly rate, minus what the agent costs to run. It is easy to check, it is easy to present, and it is wrong in a specific and predictable direction.
The tasks that do not clear
No agent clears everything. That is not a failure of engineering, it is the nature of the work. The question is what happens to the remainder, and what the remainder costs. A failed task is more expensive than an untouched one, because a person now has to read the agent’s attempt, decide it is wrong, and then do the job anyway.
On five hundred tasks a month at ninety-two percent accuracy, that is forty escalations. If each takes twelve minutes instead of the original six, the exception handling alone eats eight hours a month. It moves a headline first-year figure of fourteen thousand down to about eleven.
Why showing it wins work
Your prospect has been quoted the naive number by three other agencies. Being the one who volunteers the exception line does two things: it makes the rest of your estimate credible, and it survives the meeting where finance stress-tests it. A smaller number you can defend beats a larger one that collapses.