Per-agent and per-project payback period, annual ROI %, and 5-year Net Present Value.
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.
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:
Field
Meaning
Manual hours per case
How long a human takes to do what the agent now does.
Hourly rate
Loaded cost — salary, benefits, overhead.
Volume per month
Realistic monthly throughput.
Replacement ratio
1.0 means the agent fully replaces the human; lower values reflect partial replacement.
The monthly labour saved is hours × rate × volume × replacement_ratio.
A favourable headline ROI that ignores compliance risk is a fiction. Observatory adjusts:
risk_adjusted_npv = npv × (1 − risk_penalty)
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.
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:
