Before you roll out AI tools to a team, you need a number a finance lead will believe. This calculator turns the time AI saves on repetitive tasks into monthly hours saved, a salary-equivalent value, and a projected annual ROI — using inputs you can measure rather than vendor marketing.
How it works
For every task you add, the tool computes the minutes saved per run as manual minutes − AI minutes, then multiplies by how often the task runs each month. That gives monthly minutes saved,
converted to hours. Multiplying by your hourly staff cost produces the salary-equivalent value, and
multiplying that by twelve gives the annual figure.
It also expresses total savings as full-time-equivalents — dividing monthly hours saved by about 160 productive hours per person — because “frees up 1.4 FTEs” lands harder in a budget meeting than “saves 224 hours.”
Build an honest business case
- Use fully-loaded hourly cost, not raw salary. Benefits, tax, tooling, and management overhead typically add 30–50% on top of base pay.
- Be strict on AI minutes. Count prompting, reviewing, and fixing — not just the seconds the model takes to respond. Output that needs heavy editing saves far less than it looks.
- Measure, don’t guess. Time three or four real instances of a task with and without AI before trusting the projection.
- Subtract tool cost from the monthly value to get net ROI; the gap is usually large in AI’s favour, which is exactly the point you want to make.