Engineering, production, governance, cost, communication · insight-1298
Quote an automation benefit as residual human workload, not as the share automated
- Evidence type
- practitioner heuristic
- Difficulty
- easy
- Roles
- Data scientist, Data analyst, Applied AI
- Industries
- cross-industry, insurance, telecom
Summary: situation, action, reason, boundary
Situation
A business case says a triage model will 'automate 80 percent' of 10,000 monthly cases (hypothetical).
Action
State workload instead: cases still handled by people, measured minutes per case in each bucket (auto-handled, sampled for review, escalated), and review and exception handling time; compute hours before and after from pilot timings.
Reason
Share of cases automated and effort saved are different quantities when cases differ in handling time.
Boundary
Triage, routing, document processing and support automation business cases.
Symptom or risk
Staff plan for 80 percent fewer hours, but the automated cases were the quick ones and the rest need more time each, so the saving disappoints and trust drops.
Exceptions
If handling time is roughly equal across cases, share automated approximates effort saved.
Trade-offs
Needs a timing study; a small pilot with stopwatch data is enough.
Pitfalls
Using the average handling time for the cases that remain.
Example
Hypothetical: 8,000 easy cases at 3 minutes and 2,000 hard at 18 minutes are 1,000 hours a month. Automating the 8,000 easy cases (80 percent of volume) leaves 600 hours, a 40 percent saving, before review time.