AI gets talked about as if every business needs it. Some do, some don’t. The honest answer depends on one thing: whether it saves more than it costs. Here’s a simple way to work that out for your business before you spend anything.
The three-step test
- Find the repetitive work. List the jobs your team does the same way every week: sorting the shared inbox, typing details from one system into another, chasing documents, building reports, writing up meetings. Estimate the hours each takes across the whole team.
- Be realistic about how much can be automated. Some jobs automate almost completely; others only partly, because a person still checks the result. As a rough guide, assume half of inbox work, most of a meeting write-up, and two-thirds of re-typing and reporting.
- Put a price on the time and compare. Multiply the hours saved by a realistic hourly cost (salary plus employer costs), then compare with what the automation costs over a year.
Our AI savings calculator does these sums for you in about two minutes.
A worked example
Take a 20-person professional firm. Across the team, each week:
- 10 hours go on the shared inbox
- 6 hours go on meeting and call write-ups
- 8 hours go on re-typing information
- 5 hours go on chasing
- 3 hours go on reports
Apply realistic automation shares and that’s about 20 hours a week that could be automated, or around 940 hours over a 46-week working year. At £25 an hour, that time is worth roughly £23,500 a year.
Our Monthly AI Support Essentials plan costs £5,508 + VAT a year. Even if the real savings came in at half the estimate, the plan would still pay for itself twice over. That’s the kind of margin you want: enough that the decision doesn’t depend on optimistic assumptions.
One real result for comparison: for a Cardiff construction and QS consultancy, writing up a set of meeting minutes went from about four hours to 15–20 minutes with Meeting Minutes AI.
The costs people forget
- Checking time. Most good automations hand anything unusual to a person. Budget for someone to spend a little time checking, especially early on.
- Changes. Suppliers change invoice layouts, software updates, processes evolve. Someone has to keep automations working. On a monthly plan that’s included; on a one-off build, ask what it costs.
- Licences. Some tools need extra licences, such as Microsoft Copilot or a document-reading service. Get these costs up front.
- Getting people to use it. An automation nobody trusts gets ignored. Involve the people who do the work from the start.
When AI isn’t worth it
- Low volume. A task done twice a month rarely justifies automating.
- Every case is different. If each job needs genuine judgement, AI can help draft, but it won’t take the work away.
- Messy processes. Automating a muddled process just makes the muddle faster. Sometimes the right first step is tidying the process, not adding AI.
- Your data can’t safely leave the building. If you handle very sensitive data, check where any AI service processes it before going further.
A good adviser will tell you when something isn’t worth automating. We do.
Where to start
Pick the single most repetitive job in your business and test the sums on that alone. If it passes comfortably, that’s your first automation. If you’d like someone to look properly, our free automation audit is up to two hours going through your systems, with a written report of where the real savings are.