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.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.flowx.ai/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
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:| 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. |
hours × rate × volume × replacement_ratio.
The four numbers
| Number | Formula | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly savings | Labour saved − LLM cost − ops overhead | Run-rate impact. |
| Payback period | Implementation cost ÷ monthly savings | How fast the investment pays for itself. |
| Annual ROI % | (Annual savings − annual cost) ÷ implementation cost | Percentage return on the up-front investment. |
| 5-year NPV | Discounted sum of net cashflows over 5 years | The standard finance comparison number. |
Risk adjustment
A favourable headline ROI that ignores compliance risk is a fiction. Observatory adjusts: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
Worked example
A claims-approval agent in production:| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| Manual hours per case | 0.6 |
| Hourly rate | $52 |
| Volume / month | 4,200 |
| Replacement ratio | 0.85 |
| LLM cost / month | $1,180 |
| Implementation cost | $48,000 |
| Risk penalty | 0.08 |
- 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
Related resources
Compliance ROI
The audit-savings half of the calculation.
Sensitivity analysis
Replace point estimates with confidence ranges.