Automation ROI calculator
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21 working days a month. Nothing you type leaves this page.
A store owner who was pitched AI software wrote that paying a clerk to type the data in by hand was cheaper and more reliable than what the vendor wanted to sell. For that job, at that price, the owner was probably right.
Whether AI is worth it depends on the job in front of you, and you can work it out with numbers you already have.
How do you work out the ROI of AI automation?
Price the manual job first. Take one job that someone repeats all day and multiply four things:
- How many times a day it is done.
- How many minutes it takes each time.
- The working days in a month.
- What an hour of that person's time costs you.
Sixty orders a day at five minutes each is five hours of typing every day. Over twenty-one working days that is a hundred and five hours, more than half of one person's job.
The calculator at the top of this page does the multiplication. Nothing you type into it leaves the page.
What should that number be compared with?
Compare a year of the manual job with the price of the build plus what the system costs to run. A build is quoted once. Running it adds monthly bills for the AI usage, the hosting, any connected software and upkeep.
Take those monthly bills off what the job costs you each month, then divide the price of the build by what is left. The result is the number of months before the system has paid for itself. The calculator works that out too, once you type in a quote and a running cost of your own. Under a year is a comfortable answer. If it comes out at several years, keep doing the job by hand.
In a company of ten, the retyping often falls to someone whose main job is selling or serving customers, so every hour of it is taken from that work.
What does the math leave out?
The calculator counts wages and nothing else, so it understates the return in some cases and overstates it in others.
It leaves out gains such as these:
- Mistakes. A wrong quantity on an order costs a return and a credit.
- Speed. A system answers at night and on weekends, when your staff do not.
The owner's own hours do not appear on a wage sheet either.
It also leaves out costs. Your team will spend time explaining the job to whoever builds the system and checking its results, and the system will need small changes as your business changes.
When is the answer no?
There are three cases, and a good developer will tell you when you are in one of them.
- The job is rare. Something done twice a week will not pay for a build, however annoying it is.
- The job keeps changing. If the steps are different every month, a system would always be one version behind. Settle how you do it first.
- Software you can buy already does it. If a subscription covers the job, start there.
What has it returned for other companies?
Airu Labs builds custom AI systems for small and mid-size companies, wired into the software they already use. Two of its builds give a sense of scale. All three figures come from the systems' own records.
An ordering assistant that reads customers' orders and places them took 20 hours a week of order entry off the staff.
A purchasing system for a paper and packaging distributor returned its value in a different way. It put $22,000 a year back into products that sell and handed the owner 40 hours a month of his own time. That money had been sitting in stock the company reordered out of habit, a return no wage calculation would show.
Run your own numbers in the calculator at the top. If the job you priced looks worth building, bring it to a 30-minute call and we say on the call whether we agree. Before you hire anyone for it, read the ten questions to ask an AI developer.