What is manual work costing you?
Move the sliders. The dollar figure is what repetitive work is quietly costing your team today at your loaded salary rate.
See what automation is worth to you.
Adding one senior engineer costs $200k+/year loaded. Move the sliders — the dollar figure is what the manual work is quietly costing you today.
Ops, marketing, engineering, support — whoever spends time on repeat work.
Salary + benefits + overhead per person, per year.
Follow-ups, data entry, boilerplate, triage — the work you'd rather delegate.
Hours reclaimable / year
36,400hrs
Equivalent digital headcount
18people of manual work
What that manual work is costing you
$2,100,000
For context: our engagements start well below that figure. That gap is why the conversation is short.
*Illustrative. The figure is the current cost of manual work at your loaded rate — the first-year unlock depends on how much of it we automate, agreed in writing before we start.
How to calculate your AI automation ROI
The calculator is a two-minute exercise, but the numbers only matter if the inputs are honest. Here is how to set each one.
- 1
Set team size on repetitive workflows
Count the people who spend meaningful time on repetitive workflows — ops, marketing, engineering, support, whoever touches repeat work. Include contractors if they cost you real dollars.
- 2
Set the fully-loaded salary
Use the average fully-loaded salary — salary plus benefits plus overhead per person, per year. This is the number that matters for ROI, not the sticker salary.
- 3
Set the percentage of time on manual work
Estimate the percentage of that team's time spent on follow-ups, data entry, boilerplate, triage — the work you would rather delegate. Most teams underestimate this by 10-20 percentage points.
- 4
Read the annual cost
The dollar output is what manual work is quietly costing you today at your loaded rate. A meaningful engagement typically automates 30-70% of that cost — first-year unlock depends on how much of the work is automatable, agreed in writing before the engagement starts.
Why this number matters more than any pricing page
The calculation itself is simple: team size × fully-loaded salary × percentage on manual work. That is the annual dollar cost of manual work at your organisation today. It is money already being spent — just on humans doing repetitive tasks instead of software.
The $200,000-a-year loaded cost of adding one senior engineer is the anchor most operators know intuitively. The number the calculator outputs typically dwarfs that anchor by 10-50x. If your team is 50 people at $120k loaded doing 35% manual work, that is $2.1 million spent on repetitive work every year. An engagement that recovers even 30% of it is worth $630k in year one.
This is why we do not publish a rate card. The right question is not “what does AI consulting cost?” The right question is “what is manual work costing us, and how much of it can we automate?” Answer that first. The engagement price becomes a rounding error against the number on this page.
Common questions about AI ROI
How does an AI ROI calculator work?
An AI ROI calculator estimates the current cost of manual work at your organisation. The math is: team size on repetitive workflows × fully-loaded salary × percentage of time on manual work. The output is the annual dollar cost of that work today. It is a value anchor, not a quote — it tells you what automation is worth, not what it costs.
What counts as manual work?
Manual work is any repetitive task performed by a person that could be performed by software given the right context: follow-ups, data entry, triage, boilerplate document generation, lead qualification, meeting summarisation, expense classification, ticket routing. It is not the work that requires human judgement — it is the work that consumes human time without needing human judgement.
Why use fully-loaded salary instead of base salary?
Because fully-loaded salary is what the person actually costs the business — base salary plus payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, office overhead, and management overhead. In most organisations the loaded number is 1.3-1.5x base salary. Using base salary understates the ROI of automation by 30-50%.
What does 'equivalent digital headcount' mean?
It is the number of full-time-equivalent people that manual work represents. If your team of 50 spends 35% of their time on manual work, that is 17.5 people worth of manual work embedded in the team. Automation does not necessarily mean firing 17.5 people — it means reclaiming that capacity for higher-value work, or growing without needing to add those roles.
How much of the calculated cost can automation actually recover?
Typical engagements recover 30-70% of the calculated cost in year one. The exact percentage depends on how much of the manual work is structured (highly automatable) versus judgement-dependent (partially automatable). We scope the recoverable percentage against your specific workflows in a briefing, then guarantee it in writing before the engagement starts.
Is this calculator specific to AI, or general automation?
The math is general — it works for any form of automation including rule-based scripts, RPA, or workflow tools. AI expands what is automatable by handling unstructured inputs (documents, conversations, images) that rule-based automation cannot. The calculator estimates the total addressable cost; AI's role is to expand how much of that cost is actually recoverable.
Ready to close the gap?
30-minute briefing. Scoped proposal in 48 hours.
The calculator tells you what is at stake. The briefing tells you what we can recover, and what it costs.