What AI Automation Actually Returns: A Worked Example, in Real Numbers
Most AI marketing asks you to believe a vibe: "transform your operations", "unlock productivity", "work smarter". None of that survives contact with a sceptical business owner — and nor should it. So here is the opposite: a complete, line-by-line worked example of what automation returns for a typical small professional-services firm, with every assumption shown. The numbers below are an illustrative composite drawn from our discovery calls, not a testimonial — because the only numbers that actually matter are yours, and we put those in writing after one 30-minute call.
The Method: Their Numbers, Rounded Down
Every estimate we produce is built from figures the business gives us on a call, never from industry averages. For each repetitive task we capture three things: who does it, how many times a week it happens, and how long one instance takes. Hours per week is simply frequency times duration. We then price those hours at the person's loaded cost — salary divided by 1,650 working hours, times 1.3 for National Insurance, pension, and overheads — so the value is what the business genuinely pays, not a made-up consultancy rate.
The step most AI vendors skip: we never claim a workflow removes 100% of a task. Every workflow gets an honest automation rate. Fully automated with a human only reading the log? 90%. A human approves each action before it goes out? 75%. A human regularly edits the output? 60%. And every result is rounded down to the nearest half-hour. If the case is real, it survives conservative arithmetic.
The Worked Example: A Twelve-Person Firm
Take a small firm with an office manager on £30,000 (a loaded cost of about £23.60 an hour) and a fee-earner on £70,000 (about £55.20 an hour). On the discovery call they describe where the week goes, and five workflows emerge:
Five workflows, with the calculation shown for each:
- Invoice chasing — 25 invoices a week at 12 minutes each is 5.0 hours. Automated with one approval point (the final-notice email waits for a human click), so 75%: 3.5 hours returned, worth £81 a week
- Enquiry triage and booking — 30 enquiries a week at 15 minutes each is 7.5 fee-earner hours. Each consultation slot is approved by a human, so 75%: 5.5 hours returned, worth £303 a week
- File opening and re-keying between systems — 20 a week at 12 minutes is 4.0 hours. Fully automated and logged, 90%: 3.5 hours returned, worth £81 a week
- Weekly reporting — 3 reports at an hour each. Fully automated, 90%: 2.5 hours returned, worth £138 a week
- Client update emails — 21 a week at 10 minutes is 3.5 hours. Non-standard replies wait for approval, 75%: 2.5 hours returned, worth £58 a week
returned every week — £661 a week, roughly £2,860 a month, priced at the firm's own staff costs. Not a projection: an addition of five conservative, individually-checkable lines.
Against the Cost
Set that against what the firm pays. At our founder pricing — a one-off integration fee of £2,500 and £995 a month, locked in for early clients — the first year costs £14,440 against roughly £34,300 of returned time. That is about £2.38 back for every £1 spent, with the integration fee paying for itself inside the first month. Those hours also compound: the fee-earner time returned above is capacity the firm can sell, which the calculation deliberately does not include.
Also deliberately excluded: fewer re-keying errors, faster response to new enquiries, and the ability to take on more clients without hiring. All real, all valuable — and all absent from the number, because a figure you can defend line-by-line beats a bigger one you cannot.
The Approval Points Are Part of the Price
Notice that three of the five workflows run at 75%, not 90%. That is the cost of keeping a human in the loop — the final-notice email, the consultation booking, the unusual client reply all wait for a click. We price the human check into the arithmetic rather than claiming full automation and quietly adding "oversight recommended" later. You choose which actions stay approval-only, and they stay that way until you decide otherwise.
Sometimes the arithmetic says no. A firm whose repetitive work adds up to four hours a week should not buy this — and we tell them so, in the written estimate. Sending a document that says "the numbers don't work for you yet" costs us a sale and buys something worth more.
Get This Calculation for Your Own Firm
The example above took one conversation to build. On a 30-minute discovery call we map where your team's week actually goes, and within 24 hours you get this exact document with your numbers in it: the five workflows we'd build, the hours each returns, the approval points, the cost, and the payback week. If they stack up, you'll see precisely why. If they don't, you'll see that too. And the estimate is not just a sales document — it is the yardstick for our guarantee. If the workflows don't return the hours it puts in writing, measured over your first 90 days, we refund the integration fee in full. The contract matches: a three-month initial term, the same window as the guarantee, then rolling monthly with 30 days' notice.
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