The claim needs a number
Every AI employee is sold as 24/7. Whether that matters depends entirely on what happens outside your hours in your business, and most companies have never looked, because there was no reason to.
Check when enquiries actually arrive
Timestamp your inbound over a few months. Consumer businesses often see evenings and weekends dominate; a domestic B2B business may find almost nothing arrives after six. The answer changes the value of coverage by an order of magnitude.
Response speed matters most where choice is easy
If a prospect can contact three suppliers in five minutes, replying first is worth a great deal. If your category involves a considered procurement process, a reply at nine the next morning costs nothing — this is the same judgment as qualifying inbound quickly.
Always-on is worth exactly as much as what arrives while you’re off.
Coverage is not resolution
An out-of-hours acknowledgement that captures details and sets expectations is valuable and simple. Full resolution at 3am is a much larger commitment, and it needs an escalation path that exists at 3am or it fails at the first hard case.
Count it separately in the business case
Work that was never being done isn’t a cost saving, it is new capacity. Mixing the two produces a number nobody believes — which is why coverage belongs on its own line.
Watch what the night shift does to quality
Nobody is reviewing at 2am, so out-of-hours output goes unchecked for longest. Sample it deliberately in the morning rather than assuming it matches daytime performance.