The line every agent ROI calculator leaves out
Hours saved times hourly rate is the easy sum. The tasks your agent does not clear are the expensive ones, and almost nobody prices them before the contract gets signed.
Wren Okafor
Nearly every automation proposal runs the same sum: hours saved, times a loaded hourly rate, minus what the agent costs to run. It is easy to check, easy to present, and wrong in one specific, predictable direction.
The tasks that do not clear
No agent clears everything, and that is not a flaw in the engineering, it is the nature of the work. What matters is what happens to the remainder and what it costs. A failed task costs more than an untouched one, because a person 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 one takes twelve minutes instead of the original six, exception handling alone eats eight hours a month, and a headline first-year figure of fourteen thousand quietly becomes about eleven.
Why showing it wins work
Your prospect has already heard the naive number from three other studios. Volunteering 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.