AI automation ROI calculator

How it works

Weekly value is hours saved per week multiplied by the loaded hourly cost of the person whose time is freed — loaded meaning salary plus benefits and overhead, not the base wage. Using the base wage is the most common way these estimates flatter themselves, and it understates value for expensive people as often as it overstates it for cheap tasks.

Build cost is build hours times the build rate, whether that rate is a contractor invoice or the internal cost of your own time. Payback weeks is build cost divided by weekly value minus weekly run cost — the run cost matters because an automation with API fees and maintenance never pays back at the naive rate.

First-year ROI is fifty-two weeks of value, minus build cost, minus fifty-two weeks of run cost, all divided by build cost plus fifty-two weeks of run cost. A positive number means the automation returns more than it consumes in year one; the payback figure tells you how long you are underwater before that.

Assumptions and limitations

• Hours saved is the number everyone overestimates. Automations rarely eliminate a task cleanly — they shrink it and add a review step — so measure the task honestly before and after rather than trusting the pre-build guess.
• Time saved only becomes money if it is redeployed to valuable work. Freeing three hours a week that dissolve into slack produces real ROI of zero, whatever this calculator says.
• Run cost drifts: API pricing changes, edge cases accumulate, and someone has to maintain the thing. A fixed weekly run cost is a simplification — revisit it quarterly.
• The model ignores risk and rework. If the automation breaks a process or produces errors someone must catch, those costs are real and not captured here.