One of the biggest barriers to AI adoption is unclear ROI. Decision-makers hesitate to approve spending when they can't quantify the return. But automation ROI is actually straightforward — once you know how to frame the calculation.
Step 1: Identify Manual Hours
Calculate the monthly manual hours your team spends on repetitive, rule-based tasks. These are your automation targets — activities like data entry, report generation, appointment scheduling, payment reconciliation, or customer follow-up.
Be specific. The more precisely you can define the task, the more accurately you can estimate the savings.
Step 2: Multiply by Hourly Cost
Use the fully-loaded cost of your team — not just salary. Include benefits, overhead, and management time. For most businesses, the real cost per hour is 1.3–1.5× the base salary rate.
Step 3: Estimate Automation Efficiency
Automation rarely eliminates 100% of manual effort — there are always edge cases that require human review. Realistic efficiency ranges:
A conservative 40–60% efficiency target is appropriate for most automation proposals and holds up under scrutiny.
Step 4: Annualize Savings
Annualizing makes the business case tangible for finance teams and leadership. A $1,800/month saving becomes a $21,600/year line item — easy to compare against a one-time setup investment.
Worked Example
At 4.4 months to break-even with a 12-month contract, the ROI is approximately 170% in the first year alone.
Final Insight
Use the BVTGS ROI Calculator to run this analysis against your own numbers in under two minutes.