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Financial ROI is the bottom of the stack — the actual numbers your CFO needs. Per-agent payback, annual ROI %, 5-year Net Present Value, with risk adjustment.

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Configuring agent baselines

The ROI calculation hinges on the baseline — what manual effort the agent replaces. Without a baseline, an agent has no measurable upside. Each agent baseline carries: The monthly labour saved is hours × rate × volume × replacement_ratio.

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The four numbers

Default discount rate is 10% — configurable per org.

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Risk adjustment

A favourable headline ROI that ignores compliance risk is a fiction. Observatory adjusts:
The risk penalty is derived from the app’s Risk Dashboard score. High-risk apps see a meaningful haircut on their NPV; low-risk apps see ~none. This means an agent with low LLM cost and high compliance gaps may rank below an agent with higher LLM cost but a clean governance posture.

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Per-project view

Project-level ROI is the sum of per-agent ROI for agents in the project, with shared implementation costs amortised across them. The project view shows:
  • Aggregate payback period
  • Per-agent contribution stacked
  • Sensitivity bands from Monte Carlo

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Worked example

A claims-approval agent in production: Computed:
  • Monthly labour saved: 0.6 × 52 × 4,200 × 0.85 = $111,384
  • Monthly savings: 111,384 − 1,180 = $110,204
  • Payback: 48,000 ÷ 110,204 ≈ 0.4 months
  • Annual ROI %: ≈ 2,650%
  • 5-year NPV (10% discount): ≈ $5.0M
  • Risk-adjusted NPV: ≈ $4.6M

Compliance ROI

The audit-savings half of the calculation.

Sensitivity analysis

Replace point estimates with confidence ranges.
Last modified on June 1, 2026

Related topics

ROI & valueCompliance ROIValue Outcome UnitsSensitivity analysisAnalytics