AI Automation ROI

Verdict

POSITIVE ROI

Net $3229/mo at expected settings and still $1683/mo at conservative — the automation clears its own costs.

Key figures

Net benefit / month	$3,229
Hours released / month	57.3 h
Technician-equivalents	0.41
Payback on integration	1.9 months
API cost / month	$220
API cost basis	manual input (estimated*)
What to do	DEPLOY WITH REVIEW GATES
Why	Clears costs even at conservative settings. Deploy with human review gates and track actual vs modeled monthly.
Pricing link	Deflection is repricing seat labor across the industry (2026: $90/seat labor dropping to $60–$70 with AI-assisted triage*) — feed the released hours back into the Minimum Profitable Price calculator.

Assessment

Gross minutes saved are haircut by review (1.5 min/task), rework (12%), and failed-run cleanup. API basis: manual input (estimated*). Released hours are capacity, not cash, unless a hire is avoided or the time is billed.

Questions for the founder

Is the success rate measured on your tickets or quoted from a vendor deck?
Who reviews automated output, and is their time in the model?
What is the rollback plan when the model degrades? Governance cost covers monitoring — keep it non-zero.

Assumptions & method

Failed-run cleanup assumed at 30% of task time for non-completed automations.
Technician-equivalent uses 140 productive hours/month.
Manual API figure is estimated*; supply a model + tokens for SSOT pricing.

Generated by AICost.ai (aicost.msp-ai-roi), CloudIntelligence.ai LLC. API pricing is sourced vendor-exact from a daily-maintained pricing single source of truth as of 2026-07-20. Values marked with an asterisk are analyst estimates rather than vendor-verified data. This memo is a cost-and-unit-economics analysis prepared for diligence purposes; it is not investment advice, and it does not assess team, market, product or legal risk.