Volume is the whole decision
Automation cost is mostly fixed; savings scale with volume. A 120-hour build at $95/hour is $11,400 — at 80 tasks a month saving 9 minutes each, that's $456/month and a 25-month payback. At 2,400 tasks a month it pays back in weeks. Check volume before you check feasibility.
The last 20% costs more than the first 80%
Getting AI to handle the common case is fast. Handling every edge case, exception, and malformed input is where projects die. Ship the 80% path with clean human handoff for the rest — a partial automation that works beats a complete one that never launches.
- • Route low-confidence cases to a human instead of guessing.
- • Log every escalation; those logs are your next automation backlog.
- • Measure error rate in production, not on your test set.
- • Budget 15–25% of build cost per year for maintenance.
Freed hours must go somewhere
Saving 200 hours a month only produces value if those hours become higher-value work or avoided hires. Decide before you build what the team will do with the capacity. Automations that free time nobody reallocates show up as a cost line and nothing else.
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Read the guideFAQ
How do I know if a workflow is worth automating with AI?
Multiply monthly volume by minutes per task by hourly cost to get today's spend. If the build cost divided by realistic monthly savings is under six months, it's usually worth it. Under 500 tasks a month, automation rarely pays back before the tooling changes.
What automation rate should I assume?
60–85% of tasks fully handled is realistic for a well-scoped workflow. Assuming 100% is the single most common reason automation business cases miss — there are always exceptions that need a human.
How much maintenance does an AI automation need?
Budget 15–25% of the original build cost per year. Prompts drift as models update, upstream data formats change, and edge cases accumulate. Automations are not build-and-forget.
Should I count error rework?
Always. A 6% error rate on 1,800 automated tasks is 108 tasks that come back to a human — often taking longer than doing them manually, because someone must first work out what went wrong.
Is it cheaper to hire someone than to automate?
At low volume, usually yes. Compare the fully-loaded annual cost of the hours involved against build plus run cost. Under a few hundred tasks a month, a person is typically cheaper and far more flexible.
How long should an AI automation take to build?
A well-scoped single workflow is typically 40–200 hours including evaluation and error handling. If the estimate exceeds 300 hours, the scope is probably several workflows wearing a trench coat — split it.
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