ROI

Published July 2026 · 7 min read

The honest ROI of AI for operations teams

Every AI vendor has a slide that says '10× productivity' or '80% cost reduction'. Most of those numbers are made up. Here's how we think about ROI at OmniPaws — and the methodology we'd encourage you to apply to any AI vendor's pitch.

Start by listing the actual hours your team spends on automatable work. Be specific: 'Sarah spends 4 hours/week logging leads in Plane'. 'David spends 6 hours/week chasing invoice status in Odoo'. 'The whole team loses 30 minutes a day to context-switching between WhatsApp and the CRM'. Add it up.

Now subtract what the AI will actually do. Not 'could do' — what it will reliably do on day 30, after UAT and tuning. Be conservative. If the AI replaces 60% of those hours, that's your numerator.

Multiply by the loaded hourly cost of the person doing the work. For a US-based ops hire at $60k fully loaded, that's about $30/hour. For a Hong Kong or Shenzhen hire, the number is much lower — and that's fine, just use the real number.

Subtract the AI's all-in cost — OmniPaws tier, infrastructure, integration work, internal change-management time. If the number is positive, you're profitable. If it's not, you're buying novelty, not automation. Be honest with yourself about which one you're after.

For our own operations, that exercise came out to 88% annual cost reduction — the number on our pricing page. It wasn't a target; it was the result of doing the math honestly. Yours may be smaller, and that's okay. A 30% real reduction still beats a 10× slide-deck claim.

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