Why most ROI claims are nonsense

Open any AI chatbot vendor's website and you'll find an ROI calculator. Plug in some numbers, watch it return "12× ROI in 30 days." The math behind these calculators is almost always inflated in three predictable ways. Inflated baseline. The calculator assumes you currently capture 0% of after-hours inquiries. In reality, most businesses capture some — through email, voicemail, contact forms — so the "incremental" lift from a chatbot is smaller than the calculator suggests. Inflated conversion rates. Vendor calculators assume the chatbot converts inquiries to customers at industry-best rates. In practice, your conversion rate is whatever your conversion rate already is. A chatbot capturing more leads at the top doesn't fix a leaky funnel below. Hidden costs ignored. Setup time, content preparation, monthly review, occasional content updates, and the cost of a wrong answer that costs you a customer — none of this shows up in vendor calculators. The result: a calculator that returns "$50,000 in additional revenue" when the honest number is closer to "$3,000-8,000 in additional revenue, plus $1,500 saved in staff hours, minus $2,400 in chatbot cost and roughly 8 hours of your time." That's still a positive ROI for most businesses. It just isn't the number on the marketing page.

The honest formula

Three inputs, one division.