Measure an AI pilot's quality, cost, and return

You run the order desk in the scenario. Using the pilot results, the draft audit, and the cost sheet, work out what the AI drafting tool really saves per order compared with Team B, what quality it delivers in each order channel, and what it costs per month in full. Then recommend to the operations director and finance whether to expand, fix, or stop the tool, and for which orders, with an owner, conditions, a budget cap and spend alert, a stop rule, and a review date.

Suppose you manage the order desk at a fictional building-supplies wholesaler. Twenty-four order-desk staff enter customer orders into the order system. Orders arrive as typed emails, PDF purchase orders, and handwritten faxes scanned to PDF. Phone orders, quotes, and delivery queries are outside this case; the hours below are order entry only.

For six weeks, Vendor A's AI drafting tool read each incoming order document and filled an order draft: customer, items, quantities, SKUs (stock codes), and delivery date. A person reviewed every draft, fixed it if needed, and submitted it. Vendor A also offers an auto-submit mode for drafts it marks as high confidence; it was not used.

Twelve staff volunteered and became Team A, which used the tool. The other twelve formed Team B and worked as before. One rotation assigns orders to both teams, so each team gets about 1,200 orders a week with the same mix of customers and channels: 50% typed email, 40% PDF, 10% fax, in both periods. The baseline is the four weeks before the pilot, with the same people in each team.

Table 1. Team totals

Table 2. Handling minutes per order, by channel

Table 3. Orders corrected after submission per 100 orders, by channel

Rules and other facts

• Staff hours cover reading the document, reviewing or keying the draft, checking stock, escalating, and submitting.
• An order counts as corrected when anything on it (quantity, SKU, delivery date, customer) is changed within 30 days after submission because it was wrong. The figures were pulled 30 days after the pilot ended, so every count is complete.
• Rework minutes are the time spent fixing corrected orders, logged apart from staff hours. Each correction took about 20 minutes, in both teams and both periods.
• Weekly handling minutes per order in the baseline weeks: Team A 9.1, 9.0, 9.0, 8.9; Team B 9.7, 9.6, 9.6, 9.5.
• Team A's weekly handling minutes per order in the six pilot weeks: 7.4, 6.9, 6.3, 6.2, 6.1, 6.1.
• In the pilot, 11 of the 12 Team A staff had lower handling minutes per email or PDF order than in their own baseline weeks.

During the pilot, a quality analyst checked 500 AI drafts before staff review, comparing each field with the source document. Drafts were picked at random within each channel, and faxes were oversampled on purpose. A draft counts once for a field when any line has that field wrong. A draft can have more than one wrong field, so the field columns add up to more than the last column.

Most SKU errors on email and PDF drafts were customers' own part numbers that the tool matched to a similar SKU.

Volumes. Finance converts weekly volume to months with 52 weeks / 12 months: 1,200 x 52 / 12 = 5,200 orders per team per month, or 10,400 for the desk (5,200 email, 4,160 PDF, 1,040 fax).

Cost sheet

$44 and $68 are fictional loaded costs per hour (pay plus overheads). Internal monthly costs are the same for any scope.

Finance's rules

• A freed staff hour is worth $44 because the desk now buys about 450 agency-temp hours a month at a similar cost. Freed hours above 450 a month are capacity, not cash.
• Rework time counts through the minutes per order (handling plus rework), not as a separate cost line.
• Count re-delivery cost only for corrections above the comparison team's rate.
• Net monthly benefit = value of freed hours minus total monthly cost.
• Payback in months = one-time costs divided by net monthly benefit. One-time costs = setup, IT integration, and training for everyone who will use the tool, including what was spent for the pilot.

The vendor dashboard. Vendor A's dashboard for the pilot reads: "7,200 drafts created. Time saved: 960 hours (8 minutes per draft, the default setting)." Vendor A's account manager suggests finance use this figure, doubled for the whole desk.

Documents charged. Documents charged during the pilot: 9,060. In pilot week 4, a mailbox rule sent every message in the shared inbox to the tool for two days, including newsletters and delivery notices; those 1,860 extra documents, none of them orders, were read and charged.

Spend controls. Vendor A's console can set a monthly document cap (when it is reached, new orders skip the tool and go to manual entry) and send an alert at any document count.