What would an AI service agent save you?

The assumptions, stated plainly

• Deflection means resolved end to end — no human touch. Published results: Reddit reached 46% with Agentforce; the sensible planning range for routine-heavy queues is 30–50% (sources).
• Human cost per interaction should be fully loaded (salary, benefits, tooling, management) — $8–$25 is typical across industries.
• AI consumption is real money: Agentforce prices largely per conversation (Flex Credits). We include it; most calculators don't.
• Not included: implementation cost (our pilots are fixed-price — ask), CSAT effects of instant 24/7 answers, or capacity value of humans redeployed to complex work. All three usually help the case.
• The sensitivity range shows ±10 points of deflection — because the honest answer before a pilot is a range, and the pilot's job is to turn it into a number.

Want the number validated against your real case mix? That's exactly what the fixed-price 90-day Agentforce Pilot measures — or start with a strategy workshop and we'll model it with you.

The model is deliberately simple: monthly interaction volume × deflection rate × loaded cost per human interaction, minus platform consumption (Flex Credits) and run costs, sensitivity-tested across deflection assumptions. Simple is the point — a business case you can explain to a CFO in one breath beats a 40-tab model nobody trusts.

Its limits, stated plainly: it prices the efficiency rung of the Value Pyramid only. Experience gains (customers who stop waiting), growth effects (agents that qualify at 2 a.m.), and reinvention value don't fit in a deflection formula — they show up in the pilot's measured results instead. And the deflection rate you enter matters more than every other input combined; we baseline it from your actual case data in a workshop, not from a vendor benchmark. For the revenue-side economics, pair this with the Revenue Cloud article.