Test 06
The Released Hour Test
Your agents freed capacity. Where did it go?
What everyone does instead
AI and agentic deployments are justified on hours saved, and the hours saved are usually real and measurable. What happens next is not measured at all. Freed capacity has no owner and no destination, so it is reabsorbed by whatever expands to fill it, more internal review, more CRM detail, more meetings. The business case is signed off on the release and never audited on the redeployment.
What to compute
- Hours genuinely released, from system logs rather than from a vendor estimate.
- Selling time as a share of gross hours, before and after, measured the same way both times.
- The difference between hours released and hours that appear as selling time, the unaccounted residual.
- The residual valued at your own marginal profit per selling hour.
The arithmetic
90 reps, 169,200 gross hours in the period Administrative hours released by agents 8,400 Selling time, 24% to 26% of gross hours 0.02 x 169,200 3,384 Unaccounted residual 8,400 - 3,384 5,016 60% of what was released Marginal profit per selling hour $629 5,016 x $629 $3,155,064 per year
Worked example
A 90-rep organisation following an agentic deployment: 8,400 administrative hours measurably released, 3,384 of which appeared as selling time. The unaccounted 5,016 hours, 60% of what was released, are worth about $3.16M a year at the firm's own marginal profit per selling hour.
Illustrative figures. The relationship shown is the hypothesis the test exists to check.
What changes if this is true
Released capacity is worth nothing until someone points it somewhere. If the residual is large, the business case that justified the tooling was signed off on the release and never audited on the redeployment, and the hours you paid for are financing internal process.
What you need and how long
Activity and time-allocation data, before and after
- Where it lives
- CRM, calendar, agent logs
- Days
- 1.5
Opportunity and win-rate data for marginal value
- Where it lives
- CRM
- Days
- 0.5
Residual calculation and valuation
- Where it lives
- Analysis
- Days
- 1
Every test runs on the same two extracts, forecast history from the CRM and contract history from billing, pulled by a RevOps analyst in about an hour. Everything is measured against your own outcomes: no benchmark, no composite, no assumed uplift.