OpenAI explains how businesses should measure AI agent returns

OpenAI published a breakdown of how businesses should evaluate investments in AI agents during what it calls the "agentic era," when automation takes over entire workflows rather than individual prompts. Instead of counting requests to the model, the guide suggests tracking useful work per dollar — how many real tasks an AI agent completed relative to the cost of running it.

For a business owner in Kazakhstan, this offers a concrete starting point: before rolling an AI agent out across every department, pick one process — say, handling customer requests or reconciling documents — and measure how many hours and how much money it actually saves. Only scenarios that prove their worth should then be expanded to other areas. This step-by-step approach reduces the risk of spending budget on features nobody uses and gives clear numbers to report to an owner or board.

1Cifer follows a similar principle: before connecting an agent to a client's 1C, CRM, or mailbox, the team first pins down one specific process and measures how many manual hours it currently takes employees — only then is the savings from automation assessed.