For back-office work rather than customer conversations. Enter how long a task takes, how often it happens, the loaded cost of the person doing it, and how much of it can realistically be automated. The output ranks your processes so you build the one that pays rather than the one that is fun.
Automation coverage. Almost no process is 100 percent automatable — there is a tail of exceptions that still needs a human, and the tail is usually 15 to 30 percent. Modelling at full coverage is the single most common reason an automation project fails to produce the savings it promised.
Use fully loaded cost — salary plus taxes, benefits, tooling, and management overhead — which typically runs 1.25 to 1.4 times base. Using base salary understates the return, and understating it is how genuinely good automation projects lose to a louder one in the same budget round.
High-frequency, low-duration tasks beat the dramatic ones almost every time. A two-minute task done forty times a day outranks a four-hour monthly report, and the four-hour report is always the one people want to automate first because it feels heavier.