Business & money
AI Chatbot Savings Calculator
Put real numbers on support deflection: what each ticket costs today, what a bot removes, and when the build pays for itself.
Net saving, first year
$27,350
- Cost per ticket today
- $5
- Human support cost
- $9,600/mo
- Tickets deflected
- 800/mo
- Net monthly saving
- $2,779
- Payback period
- 2.2 months
Agent time freed
106 hours / month
Roughly 0.8 full-time agents' worth of capacity, better spent on the hard tickets.
Strong case. The build pays for itself in under a quarter, and the freed hours go straight into the hard tickets.
Where these projections usually go wrong
Vendors quote deflection rates of eighty percent or more. In practice a bot resolves the repetitive third of your queue — order status, password resets, opening hours, refund policy — and escalates the rest. Model between thirty and sixty percent unless you have measured your own repeat-question share.
A twelve percent residual cost is applied to deflected chats here, because escalations, spot-checking answers and maintaining the knowledge base never reach zero. The savings that survive contact with reality come from capacity, not headcount: the same team absorbs growth without new hires.
Estimates are directional models for planning, not financial advice.