How much can AI save your company? A worked example

“AI will save you time” is a sentence a manager hears every week. And every time they rightly ask: how much? Until the saving is expressed in euros, it’s just a promise.

The good news is that the calculation can be done before a single euro is spent on development.

The calculation in one sentence

The saving is the time people spend on the work today, minus the time they will spend checking what the AI produces, minus the cost of the AI itself.

For that you need four numbers: how many cases you have a month, how many minutes one takes by hand, how many minutes checking will take, and what an hour of work costs.

Example: processing incoming documents

A company receives 1,500 documents a month: orders, supplier quotes and delivery notes. Someone reads each one and types the data into the system, six minutes per document on average. With AI, the data is extracted and entered automatically, and a person only checks and confirms it, say one minute per document.

Item	By hand	With AI
Documents a month	1,500	1,500
Minutes per document	6	1 (checking)
Hours a month	150	25
Cost of work, at €20 an hour	€3,000	€500
Cost of AI, say 5 cents per document	€0	€75
Total a month	€3,000	€575
Saving a year		about €29,000

This is an example, not a promise. Your numbers may be smaller or bigger, which is why they always have to be measured on your process. But the order of magnitude is realistic: when work involves a lot of repetition, the saving is measured in tens of thousands of euros a year, not in minutes.

And when does development pay off? Simply divide the cost of development by the monthly saving and you get the number of months it takes to pay back. If development costs as much as three months of savings, everything after month three is pure profit.

Where AI pays off most

The biggest savings come where three things meet:

• A lot of repetition. Hundreds or thousands of cases a month, not five.
• Text and documents. Emails, enquiries, PDFs, scanned paper, forms.
• Clear rules. You know what a good result looks like, so it’s easy to check.

Typical examples are entering data from documents, sorting and routing enquiries and emails, drafting replies to customers from your knowledge base, and putting together regular reports.

Where it doesn’t

It’s only fair to say this too:

• Rare tasks. If something happens five times a month, development won’t pay back.
• Work that is different every time and needs the judgement of an experienced person.
• Work where every error is expensive and checking takes as long as doing the work itself.

A good assessment also tells you where not to bring in AI, not only where to.

Savings that don’t show up in hours

• Speed. A customer gets an answer in minutes, not tomorrow.
• Fewer errors from retyping, as we wrote in the article on manual data entry.
• Growth without hiring. Twice as many documents doesn’t mean twice as many people.
• People do more interesting work instead of retyping all day.

How to get your own numbers

1. CountHow many cases a week
2. Time itHow long one takes by hand
3. PilotAI on real data
4. CompareTime, accuracy, cost

You can do the first two steps yourself this week: count how many cases arrive a week and time ten of them. With those two numbers, the calculation above is done. The third and fourth steps need a pilot on your real data, because only that shows how much AI actually takes over. Why a pilot always starts with one process, not the whole company, is in the article on AI in business.

How we work

This is exactly what we do: we bring AI into business processes and measure the saving in euros, not in promises. We start with one process, put the calculation together with your numbers, run a pilot on real data, and only roll it out when the numbers show it pays off. The first step is a free 30-minute call.