The business case for Agentic AI: ROI for IT investments

For enterprise IT teams, downtime costs approximately $16,700 per minute, per server, on average. And for medium-sized IT teams, the price tag of downtime is approximately $5,600 per minute, per server.

With rising costs and talent shortages, IT teams need tools that deliver faster service and measurable ROI. Agentic AI is redefining IT efficiency with autonomous workflows that reclaim hours and slash ticket volumes.

With advancing technology, customers expect fast, simple, and knowledgeable service… often quite literally as quickly as a snap of the fingers. With Agentic AI, the latest iteration in artificial intelligence developments, achieving this might just be possible. 

By enabling higher efficiency, time savings, predictive maintenance, and resource optimization, Agentic AI is set to offer IT teams a measurable return on investment and transform IT operations. How? Today, we’ll explore exactly that… 

What is Agentic AI and how does it provide an ROI?

Agentic AI is artificial intelligence that is capable of operating autonomously. Agentic AI tools can learn, adapt, make independent decisions, and take actions based on context and data in real time. AI agents, or specific Agentic AI tools, are designed to execute tasks in pursuit of achieving predefined goals. 

Agentic AI goes far beyond previous models of artificial intelligence, such as conversational AI and generative AI. Whereas generative AI tools are focused on creating content from user input, Agentic AI tools can achieve a much broader range of goals. Agentic AI goes beyond responding to prompts, acting autonomously to accomplish tasks. Agentic AI also often retains memory and learns from past actions, getting better over time. 

Why does this matter for your organization’s return on investment, or ROI? Well, the autonomous decision-making of Agentic AI drives value in any IT environment. You can think of Agentic AI tools as complementing the efforts of human IT team members, taking care of routine tasks and enabling team members to focus on more complex tasks. 

Key ROI drivers of Agentic AI in IT

Let’s take a closer look at the ways that Agentic AI drives ROI…

• Efficiency and time savings: Agentic AI tools, like Atera’s Autonomous IT, have been shown to yield 11 to 13 hours per week reclaimed per technician. Talk about saving time and money! Those hours can be put toward other projects without sacrificing daily work.

Image via Atera

• Ticket volume and resolution: Atera clients who are using our AI tools have 30–70% fewer tickets, yielding 10X faster resolution. Agentic AI tools for ticketing and help desk purposes are able to resolve many common issues without the need for human intervention. When a problem does need a human professional, the Agentic AI tools will elevate that ticket to the right person to ensure quick and effective resolution. 
• Predictive maintenance: Agentic AI solutions can help avoid downtime and service disruptions with predictive maintenance that addresses problems and mitigates issues before they become critical. Industry leaders like Deloitte have also addressed the incredible potential of using AI for predictive maintenance. 
• Resource optimization: Agentic AI allows teams to do more with less. With Agentic AI, you can scale support without linear headcount growth. London’s The Sunday Times reported that over 25% of workers fear that AI will “steal” or “take over” their jobs – but in reality, Agentic AI can be a valuable supplement or complement to human positions, allowing you to get the most out of human personnel and use AI to make processes more efficient. 

4 metrics and KPIs to quantify Agentic AI ROI

Wondering how to quantify your return on investment when it comes to Agentic AI? Let’s consider some metrics and key performance indicators, or KPIs, that you can use to determine whether you’re getting good value for your spend. When you’re thinking about incorporating Agentic AI into your IT environment, set goals that you can use as benchmarks to gauge success. Here are some suggested Agentic AI KPIs for IT: 

• Tickets resolved by AI: How many tickets did your Agentic AI tool resolve? You can set a raw number or percentage goal – with Atera, clients have seen 30% to 70% of tickets resolved by AI-powered IT tools. 
• Mean time to resolution (MTTR): How long does it take for tickets to be resolved on average? You can look at MTTR in terms of Agentic AI tools as well as human technicians to demonstrate the difference – or consider MTTR as a whole to see how Agentic AI is supporting your team in becoming more efficient. Plus, reduced MTTR leads to better customer/user satisfaction. 

Image via SearchUnify

• Technician utilization: Are your technicians being utilized to the best of their ability? Divide a technician’s billable hours by their total hours and multiply by 100 to determine their utilization percentage. With Agentic AI, you can expect technician utilization to go up, as Agentic AI handles many mundane tasks that would otherwise slow them down. 
• Cost per ticket resolved: How much are you spending per ticket? The cost per ticket resolved can include factors like technician time spent, tech utilization, and more. Agentic AI tools can help reduce your cost per ticket. 

How to calculate your ROI on Agentic AI

In order to calculate your return on investment, you can use a simple formula. In short, you can divide savings by your investment, then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Wondering how to figure out your savings? One option is to compare department spend this year versus department spend last year over the same quarter. 

ROI = Savings / Investment x 100 

You can also look at ROI as a function of increased profit. Did your investment in Agentic AI lead to more profits for your company? Compare the profit this year versus the profit last year over the same quarter. If you use this formula, you’ll also need to compare your expenses over the last year to make sure that they’ve stayed consistent. Here’s the more general formula:

ROI = (Profit Q1 2025 – Profit Q1 2024) / Investment x 100%

Generally speaking, determining ROI on Agentic AI based on your savings and investment is a better method. For example, if you know that your average IT ticket cost is $17, and that Agentic AI autonomously solves 70 tickets per month, your savings would be: 

$17 (avg. ticket cost) x 70 = $1,190

And if you’re spending $150/month per month to implement Agentic AI, then your ROI would be as follows:

1,190 (savings) / 150 (investment) x 100 = 793.33%

As you can see, in this particular example, Agentic AI provides a whopping 793.33% ROI. Pretty impressive, right? 

However, if you’re in a situation where you can’t find the exact dollar value that you’re saving, then seeing how profits have been increasing since you implemented Agentic AI can be helpful. 

Real-world case studies

Want to see the power of Agentic AI in action in the real world? Check out these customer success stories from IT teams that are really using Atera.

Atera customer Leeds United Football Club was struggling with outdated IT tools and systems, relying on only six IT techs managing support for over 1,000 employees across the site. They needed an Agentic AI tool that could maintain compliance with data protection regulations, safeguard against security threats, and help them enact self-service ticketing solutions. 

With the AI Copilot of Atera, they were able to see up to a 35% ticket reduction and gained proactive monitoring capabilities that can use AI to resolve issues before they become damaging. The AI tools empowered users to resolve tickets on their own, reducing workload for busy technicians. 

That brings us to Innovate IT, another Atera customer that has been putting our Agentic AI tools to work. They’ve experienced incredible growth and success thanks to our AI IT solutions. This MSP manages over 2,300 endpoints and has a team of 21 technicians, but they were struggling to keep up with demand and were receiving over 80 support tickets every day. 

Now, after installing the Atera agent, they have been able to reduce ticket volume by 50% to between 35 and 40 tickets per day, which makes a marked impact on their customer satisfaction and bottom line. 

Roadmap to implementing Agentic AI into your IT workflow

So, how can you go about implementing Agentic AI in your IT organization? We’ve broken down the process into a few key steps that can serve as a roadmap for savvy IT professionals who are looking to remain at the forefront of IT management developments. 

• Assess: First, audit current ticketing, downtime, and labor costs. Identify areas where you believe you could see improvement as a result of Agentic AI. You’ll also want to gather baseline data to compare in order to measure future metrics against. 
• Pilot: Deploy Agentic AI in a controlled environment. For instance, you might have identified ticketing load as a top priority and therefore choose to launch Agentic AI tools for your help desk. 
• Measure: In your restricted environment, track KPIs. Compare your current metrics against the baseline data you collected at the beginning of the process in order to measure your level of success. 
• Scale: Once you have seen the transformative impact of Agentic AI, you’ll likely want to roll it out across all of your IT processes. Agentic AI has countless use cases across your IT environment, including in RMM, patching, and security.

Maximize your IT ROI with Agentic AI

Agentic AI offers new possibilities when it comes to efficiency, productivity, and utilization for IT teams. But without a tangible ROI, it can be hard to justify making an investment in new technologies. Now that you understand how Agentic AI can improve your organization’s bottom line, we hope you’re as excited to implement it into your organization as we’ve been building it.

Want to try it out for yourself? Take advantage of your free 30-day trial of Atera’s AI-powered platform and see an ROI in weeks, not months.

Not quite convinced? Learn more about how our customers have produced an ROI with Atera, and how you can too.