Pilot bracket
Council on Aging chatbot pilot
Senior services site for Martin County, Florida. Pilot integrated against existing FAQ and program eligibility content. Validated the deflection model before scaling.
For teams evaluating AI chatbots
AI chatbot ROI calculator.
Estimate the annual savings, payback period, and 3-year net from a knowledge-base-grounded AI assistant. Numbers come from real OST deployments, calibrated conservatively so the bracket is defensible to your CFO.
Calculator
How we calibrated the numbers
Three real deployments.
Deflection rates and run costs come from OST chatbot engagements across three customer segments. Each example sits at a different scope so you can sanity-check where your project lands.
Production bracket
E-commerce product support
Specialty e-commerce client. Multi-channel deployment grounded in product catalog, shipping policies, and warranty terms. Custom escalation flows to human reps.
Enterprise bracket
Multi-tenant SaaS support
Platform serving 350+ active store deployments. Per-tenant knowledge bases, brand-aware tone, full audit trail, multi-language. Same engineering pattern reused across tenants.
Methodology
How the math works.
Annual savings = monthly volume × 12 × deflection rate × cost per ticket. Deflection rate combines two multipliers, not one.
- Knowledge base maturity sets the deflection ceiling. Sparse KB caps at 15%. Decent KB caps at 22%. Mature, well-maintained KB caps at 35%. The chatbot can only answer what your KB actually documents.
- Channel multiplier reduces the ceiling based on what channel the chatbot lives on. Email and form: 1.0×. Live chat: 0.85×. Mixed: 0.85×. Phone-heavy: 0.55×. Voice questions are harder to deflect than text.
- Implementation hours follow the same hours-times-rate model as our modernization calculator. Pilot 240h, Production 600h, Enterprise 1,200h. Multiplied by the blended rate (default $65/hr).
- Monthly run cost covers LLM tokens, vector store hosting, monitoring, and minor tuning. Pilot $500, Production $1,500, Enterprise $4,000. Run cost scales with traffic volume in real deployments.
- Sales lift applies only if you enter annual revenue. Production scope adds 1% of revenue. Enterprise adds 1.5%. Pilot adds 0.5%. We assume the chatbot handles pre-sales questions, not just support.
Payback period = implementation cost / (monthly savings minus monthly run cost). 3-year net = (annual savings × 3) + (sales lift × 3) − implementation cost − (monthly run cost × 36).
What this calculator does not capture: brand voice training time, change management costs (training your support team), ongoing prompt and KB maintenance (5–10 hours per month), and the upside from reduced first-response time on tickets that do escalate.
Ready to scope a real deployment?
The calculator gives you a defensible business case for the budget conversation. A 60-minute scoping call gives you a fixed scope, a milestone plan, and a quote your team can act on.