What ROI can I expect from AI automation?

A simple ROI calculation you can do yourself

• Hours per month the job takes today (be honest, include the fiddly bits).
• Multiply by what an hour of that person's time is worth to the business.
• That gives the monthly value of the time you'd free up.
• Compare it with the one-off build cost and the monthly running costs (tool subscriptions and AI usage).
• Payback period = build cost ÷ (monthly value − monthly running cost).

The returns that are harder to count

• Speed: enquiries answered in minutes rather than days.
• Accuracy: fewer copy-and-paste mistakes between systems.
• Consistency: every customer gets the same standard of follow-up.
• Headspace: owners spending evenings on the business, not in the inbox.

Why some automations don't pay back

• The job happens too rarely to justify the build.
• The process is still changing, so the automation keeps breaking.
• A tool was bought before the problem was defined.
• Running costs were never estimated up front.

How we approach ROI

Strategy comes first and the tech comes second, only when it pays for itself. In an AI readiness audit we score every workflow on AI fit so the plan starts with the jobs most likely to pay back, and we'll say clearly when something isn't worth automating.