Everyone's rushing to slap an ROI on their new AI agent project. They tally up the licenses, maybe some training time, and call it a day. They're missing the only number that matters: what's the actual quality of the output?
If you can't measure that, you're just moving cost from one line item to another. Your model is guessing.
* **Support agent?** How many escalations did it *actually* prevent? Not just "chats resolved."
* **Code generator?** What's the defect rate in the produced code? Time spent fixing its garbage counts as a cost.
* **Document summarizer?** How often do humans have to re-read the source because the summary missed the critical point?
Vendors love to sell you on "time saved." They're silent on the cost of errors, rework, and oversight. Your ROI spreadsheet needs a column for "quality tax" – the hidden cost of managing a mediocre or unreliable agent. Without a way to quantify the bad output, that column stays at zero. And your model is fiction.
Read the contract