Question

A retail company is evaluating three candidate agent projects to fund next quarter. Leadership wants to prioritize using a defensible ROI methodology. Project A automates a manual order-reconciliation task done by 20 staff daily; the time savings are directly measurable in labor hours. Project B is a customer-facing recommendation agent whose benefit is an expected but uncertain uplift in conversion rates. Project C is an internal knowledge-search agent whose primary benefit is faster employee onboarding, with no clear baseline metric today. As the solution architect, how should you advise leadership to structure the ROI comparison so the prioritization is credible?

Accepted Answer

Classify each project's benefits as hard (directly quantifiable) or soft (estimated/intangible), establish baseline metrics where missing, and apply confidence-weighting to the uncertain benefits before comparing ROI.

Answer

Rank all three projects solely by projected dollar savings, treating the estimated conversion uplift and onboarding improvement as equal to the measured labor savings.

Answer

Fund only Project A because it is the only one with a directly measurable benefit, and defer the other two until they can produce identical hard-dollar figures.

Answer

Compare the projects purely on total cost of ownership and select the lowest-cost option, since benefits are too varied to standardize.