Support automation ROI calculator: the hours an agent would give back.
This calculator estimates how many support hours and how much cost an AI support agent would return each month, from four numbers you already know: tickets a month, minutes a ticket, loaded hourly cost, and the share of tickets the agent would resolve without a person. The default rate is what the support agent Paul Rahme built at a US marina-software company reaches; change it to what you believe. Nothing you type leaves the page.
The calculator
How the estimate is calculated
Tickets a month, multiplied by the auto-resolve rate, gives the tickets the agent closes without a person. Multiply by minutes a ticket and divide by sixty for hours returned. Multiply by loaded hourly cost for money returned. Divide hours by 160 for full-time-equivalent capacity. Use the handle time of the routine tickets, the how-to and known-issue repeats, not the queue average. The tickets an agent resolves are the quick ones; an average that includes long investigations overstates the hours.
It deliberately ignores two things that make the real number larger: first-response time falling from hours to seconds, and the engineering time no longer pulled into the queue. It also ignores what makes it smaller: the running cost of the model, which appears on your own cloud bill with a ceiling you set, the tickets that still need a person after the agent has done its part, and the fact that the resolved tickets are the shorter ones.
What to do with the number
Use it to decide whether the queue is worth mapping, not to sign anything. On the Automation Audit the same calculation is done against your actual ticket categories, your documentation, and your tools, and comes back as a written estimate you keep. If the honest answer is that your queue is too small or too varied, the map says so. The steps after the number are in how to automate customer support with AI.
For the definition of "resolved with no human touch" and the measurement behind the default rate, see the production case study.
Questions about the calculator
Is my data sent anywhere?
No. The calculation runs in your browser and nothing is stored or transmitted. Refresh the page and it resets to the defaults.
What is a realistic auto-resolve rate?
About 60% with no human touch is the production figure for the support agent Paul Rahme built at a US marina-software company, 2025–2026. Queues dominated by how-to questions and known issues with written answers reach that; queues dominated by billing, account changes, or novel technical problems will be lower, because those are exactly the tickets an agent should hand to a person.
What does "loaded hourly cost" mean?
Salary plus benefits, tools, and overhead, divided by working hours. If you do not have it, one and a quarter to one and a half times the hourly salary is a common approximation.
Related pages
Turn the estimate into a written number.
The free Automation Audit runs this against your real queue and sends the result within 48 hours.