Every AI vendor in existence will tell you that AI will save your business significant time and money. Almost none of them will tell you how, specifically, or show you the actual calculation. I find this frustrating, because the maths is not complicated - and when you run it honestly, it is still compelling. You just have to be willing to show your working.
What follows is a realistic calculation for a 50-person Northampton business going through the Foundation Programme. I have used conservative assumptions throughout. The real numbers for most clients are better than this.
"The maths is not complicated. When you run it honestly, it is still compelling. You just have to be willing to show your working."
The starting assumptions
A 50-person business typically has between eight and fifteen people doing work that involves significant repetitive language tasks - writing, summarising, formatting, researching, drafting, responding to enquiries. For this calculation, I will use ten people, which is conservative for most businesses of this size.
For each of those ten people, I am assuming that well-built AI workflows save them ninety minutes per working day. This is also conservative. In practice, the savings are often higher once the workflows are embedded and the team is using them consistently. But ninety minutes is a number I am comfortable defending.
The Calculation
Monthly time value recovered
What this means in practice
The Foundation Programme costs £4,500 per month for three months. On the numbers above, the time value recovered in the first month alone is £7,875 - nearly double the monthly investment. Over the three-month programme, the total time value recovered is around £23,625 against a total investment of £13,500.
I want to be careful about how I present this, because the numbers are not cash in the bank. The time saved is only valuable if it is redirected to something that generates revenue or reduces cost. If the ninety minutes per person per day just becomes ninety minutes of slightly less stressful work, the financial return is harder to measure. The businesses that get the clearest ROI are the ones that are deliberate about what the recovered time goes into - more client work, more sales activity, faster delivery, reduced overtime.
Important caveat
When the maths does not work out
The calculation above assumes that the workflows are actually built and the team is actually using them. Neither of these things happens automatically. The businesses that fail to get the ROI are almost always the ones that underinvested in the adoption side of the implementation - they built the tools, did a training session, and assumed the rest would follow. It does not. The maths only works if the implementation is done properly, which is why the Foundation Programme spends as much time on adoption and habit-building as it does on workflow design.
The annual picture
After the three-month Foundation Programme, most clients move to the AI Operating System Retainer at £2,500 per month. This covers ongoing optimisation, new workflow development, and the strategic advisory work that keeps the AI implementation aligned with where the business is going.
On the same conservative assumptions, the annual time value recovered - across twelve months of consistent AI use - is around £94,500. The annual cost of the retainer after the Foundation Programme is £30,000. The net position is around £64,500 in time value recovered per year, on conservative assumptions, for a 50-person business.
I am not going to tell you that every business gets these numbers. Some get more. Some get less. The variables that matter most are how many people in the business have significant admin and writing work, how well the workflows are built, and how consistently the team uses them. The Discovery Workshop is designed to give you a realistic estimate for your specific business before you commit to anything.
Damian
Founder, Rethinking Business · AI implementation for Northampton SMBs