The number every business case omits
Hours saved times hourly rate is the easy arithmetic. The tasks the agent does not clear are the expensive ones, and they are almost never in the model a board is shown.
Imogen Radcliffe
Almost every automation business case contains the same sum. Hours saved, multiplied by a loaded hourly rate, minus what the agent costs to run. It is easy to check, easy to present, and wrong in a specific and predictable direction.
The tasks that never clear
No agent clears everything. That is not an engineering failure, it is the nature of the work. The question is what happens to the remainder and what the remainder costs. A failed task is dearer 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 takes twelve minutes rather than the original six, exception handling alone consumes eight hours a month, and a headline first-year figure of fourteen thousand becomes about eleven.
Why showing it wins work
Your board has already seen the naive number from three vendors. Volunteering the exception line does two things: it makes the rest of the estimate credible, and it survives the meeting where finance stress-tests it. A smaller number that holds beats a larger one that collapses.