Practical calculator
Start with the cost of work as it is today.
A repetitive workflow may be worth examining because of its cost, delay, quality, or risk. This calculator makes the labor-time baseline explicit before anyone claims a return.
A transparent baseline
What does this recurring manual work absorb today?
Enter the people, weekly time, and fully loaded hourly cost for one workflow. This is a labor baseline, not a prediction of AI savings, revenue, or implementation return.
Your baseline
- Monthly time
- 52 hours
- Monthly labor baseline
- $3,900
- Annual time
- 624 hours
- Annual labor baseline
- $46,800
Formula: people × weekly hours per person × 52 weeks ÷ 12 × loaded hourly cost. Treat this as one input to a decision alongside quality, delay, data, risk, adoption, and implementation cost.
What to do with the number
Use it to frame a question, not a promised outcome.
Compare the baseline with the workflow’s quality risk, customer impact, data and access constraints, human-review needs, and cost of changing the process. A strong number without a safe, adoptable process is not a business case.
Confirm frequency and cost assumptions with the process owner. Keep the calculation dated so it can be updated when the workflow changes.
Record labor, software, implementation, governance, training, and exception-handling costs separately. Do not turn an avoided hour into realized savings without an operating plan.
Use the scorecard and readiness checklist to decide whether to assess, improve the process first, test an existing tool, or stop.