AI ROI Calculator: What an AI SDR Is Worth to Your Business
Four numbers you already know, and an honest estimate of the leads you are losing to silence — calculated in your browser, with the assumptions written out below.
Run the numbers
Estimated monthly result
- Leads recovered
- 16.0
- Extra jobs won
- 4.8
- Added revenue
- $12,000
- Net of AI cost
- $10,500
- ROI
- 700%
- Payback
- 0.1 months
Assumes an AI SDR reaches a 95% effective response rate and closes recovered leads at your existing close rate. Gross revenue, not profit.
What the calculator is actually assuming
The model behind the boxes is deliberately simple, because a complicated model built on guesses is still built on guesses. It starts with the number of inbound leads you get in a month, and the share of them that currently get a real, timely response — not a voicemail, not a callback two days later, but a reply while the person is still deciding. Everything above that share is already handled. Everything below it is the gap.
An AI SDR does not create demand. What it does is answer the enquiries that were already coming in, at the hour they arrive, and keep following up until somebody replies. So the calculator treats the recovered leads as the ones you were losing to silence, and it assumes the AI reaches a 95% effective response rate rather than a perfect one, because tyre-kickers, wrong numbers and duplicates exist.
Those recovered leads are then closed at the same close rate you already achieve on the leads you do answer. That is a conservative choice on purpose. A lead answered in thirty seconds usually closes better than one answered the next morning, so the real figure is often higher — but claiming a lift we cannot measure on your business would be inventing a number, and the whole point of this page is not to do that.
Added revenue is recovered leads multiplied by your close rate and your average job value. ROI is that revenue, minus the monthly cost of the AI, divided by the cost. It is gross revenue, not profit: your own material and labour costs come out of it afterwards, and on a low-margin job the ROI figure will overstate what lands in the bank. Payback is shown in months at your current volume.
The default monthly cost is the published price for Kai, our AI SDR, so the output reflects a real number rather than a placeholder. Change it to model any other tool or any other quote. Nothing here is stored, sent anywhere, or used to email you — the arithmetic happens in your browser and stops there.
How to read the answer
If the output looks enormous, check your average job value and your response rate first — those two inputs move the result more than anything else, and owners tend to be optimistic about the second one. A useful way to sanity-check it is to count last month's missed calls and unanswered form fills before you type a number in. If the result is marginal at honest inputs, that is a real answer too, and it usually means the constraint is lead volume rather than lead handling.
If the number looks worth acting on, the next step is a fifteen-minute call to check the inputs against what your phone system and inbox actually show.
Or read what Kai, our AI SDR does day to day.
Frequently asked questions
- How accurate is an AI ROI calculator?
- It is exactly as accurate as the four numbers you put into it. The arithmetic is trivial; the estimate lives or dies on your real response rate and your real average job value. Treat the output as a range rather than a forecast, and run it twice — once with your optimistic figures and once with the numbers you would defend to an accountant.
- What does an AI SDR actually cost?
- Kai starts at $1,500 a month as a managed service, which is the default filled into the calculator. That covers the sending infrastructure, sequence writing and testing, reply handling and calendar booking. Other AI answering and chatbot tools sit anywhere from $50 to several thousand a month depending on whether you are buying software or a managed outcome.
- Why does response rate matter more than close rate?
- Because a lead that never gets a reply cannot be closed at any rate. Response rate sets the size of the pool the AI is recovering, and close rate only divides it afterwards. Doubling a 40% response rate changes the result far more than a few points of close rate ever will.
- Does this only work for an AI SDR?
- No. The same model fits any tool whose job is to catch enquiries you are currently losing — an AI receptionist, a chatbot that qualifies and books, or an automated follow-up sequence. Put that tool's monthly cost in the cost field and read the result the same way.