As of June 2026, our flagship deployment returns roughly five to one monthly. Around twelve thousand conversations across five months, over a thousand support tickets automated a month, and more than fifty thousand pounds of new business closed in the first six.
Those are real, banked figures from one operation. They are also the wrong number for you to plan with, and I would rather say that than let you build a business case on somebody else's context.
Why one company's ROI does not transfer
That return came from a specific mix: a subscriber business with heavy repetitive contact, a large out-of-hours gap, and systems the agent could actually read from.
Change any of those and the number moves. A business with lower volume, or contact that genuinely needs judgment, or customer data spread across three systems with no shared key, will not see the same thing. Not because the technology differs, but because the inputs do.
Anyone quoting you a sector-wide ROI multiple is guessing with confidence.
How to work out your own
Four corrections, and vendor figures usually skip at least two.
Apply the benefit only to the work automated. If the agent handles 40% of contact, the saving applies to that 40%. Not to your total support cost. This single error is responsible for most of the inflated numbers in the category.
Use gross margin, not revenue. An agent that drives fifty thousand in sales is not a fifty thousand benefit if your margin is thirty percent.
Subtract the full running cost. Platform, model usage, ongoing tuning, integration maintenance. The tuning is the one people forget, and it is the one that keeps the thing working past month three.
Do not double count. If a contact is a containment saving, it is not also sitting in your average-handle-time reduction pool.
Do that and you get a figure you can defend to a finance director. Usually still good. Never as good as the slide.
Where the return actually comes from
Rarely where people expect.
Out-of-hours conversion is often the loudest line, because the alternative is nobody answering. Leads that used to die overnight get engaged at the moment of intent.
Volume absorbed at the boring end. Not the clever conversation, the same question asked four hundred times. In our deployment the biggest relief was the repetitive status chase, which we had not predicted.
Capacity released, not headcount removed. Your team stops clearing identical queries and starts on retention and complex cases, which is work with a higher return attached. Harder to put on a spreadsheet, usually worth more.
The number I would actually watch first
Contacts per resolved issue.
If something that used to generate four inbound touches now generates one, that is real and measurable within weeks, before any annual ROI calculation is meaningful. It is also very hard to fake, which is more than can be said for containment rate.
The honest framing
The economics of automating high-volume repetitive contact are genuinely favourable. That much is not in doubt.
What is in doubt is any specific multiple, including ours. Build the case on your own contact mix, apply the corrections above, and if the number still works with all four applied, it will survive contact with reality.
