10Estimate
Estimate what AI could save in your business
This page multiplies. You tell it how many people do a kind of work and roughly how long that work takes each of them in a week. It multiplies that across 46 working weeks a year and stops there, and shows every step of the sum so you can check it.
01
What this calculator does, and does not do
Nothing on this page is a quote. It has never seen your business, it does not know what your systems are, and it has no idea what a build would involve. The number that comes out is yours: your headcount, your hours, your arithmetic, multiplied out in front of you. There is nothing else in the sum, and every step of it is on the page so you can redo it by hand.
The answer comes out in hours a year, not money. That is deliberate. Hours are a fact about your business. Money needs a cost per hour, and only you know yours. There is an optional field for it near the bottom. Leave it blank and this page carries no currency at all, which is how we think most people should read it the first time. Fill it in and the same hours are shown in your money as well, in your browser, and that figure is never written into the shareable link.
There is no fee on this page and there is no fee anywhere on this site. The fee is a share of the measured gain. If there is no measured gain, there is no share. The calculator has no field, no setting and no line of arithmetic through which a fee could arrive, which is a design decision rather than an oversight.
people
Count only the people who actually touch this work, not the whole company. Somebody part time still counts as one person.
hours a week each
A rough number is fine. Picture a normal week, not the worst one you had.
your cost, optional
Leave this blank and the answer stays in hours. Fully loaded means pay plus tax, benefits and overhead, divided by hours actually worked. This one is never put in the shareable link and never leaves your browser.
Fill in the numbers first
Your figures
Your own numbers, multiplied out
These are your own numbers, multiplied in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and this is not a projection, an offer, or a promise about your business.
Nothing to work out yet. Pick the areas that still feel manual, then enter how many people work in them and roughly how long it takes them each week.
- People doing this work
- Hours a week each spends on it
- Working weeks a year
- 4652 weeks less about six weeks of holiday, public holidays and sick leave.
- Hours a year going into this work
We have not found a published figure we can stand behind for how much of this kind of work automation actually absorbs. Most of the numbers in circulation turn out to trace back to somebody selling something. So this stops at the hours. The hours are yours and they are right. What comes off them is a question for two weeks inside your business, not for a web page.
- People doing this work, multiplied by the hours a week each of them spends on it, multiplied by 46 working weeks, gives the hours a year going into the work. That is the output.
- If you type an hourly cost, the hours are multiplied by it. If you leave it blank there is no currency on the page at all.
- Hours are rounded to the nearest 10 above 200, and to the nearest 1 below it. Money is rounded to the nearest 100. Nothing else is rounded, so every line can be redone by hand.
02
Why there is no single savings figure
Plenty of pages open with one number: AI cuts costs by some percentage. We went looking for the sources behind the figures we had planned to put on this site, and most of them did not survive the looking. One widely repeated range, credited to a large consultancy, does not appear in that consultancy's report at all. The report gives a much smaller number, and that number is what the executives surveyed said they expect, not what anybody measured. A second figure, credited to another consultancy, is not on that firm's site, and the article a search engine credited for it does not contain it either. A third, quoted everywhere as a measured result from a technology company, is a research firm's forecast about the year 2029. A fourth traces back to one outsourcing vendor waving a consultancy's name around with no document behind it. So this site does not print a headline savings percentage. There is not an honest one to print. The full account, with each figure named and each source checked, is on where every number comes from.
15%
more issues resolved per hour by customer support agents given a generative AI assistant
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Generative AI at Work (Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond), vol. 140, issue 2, published . Read back .
Measured across 5,172 agents, with almost all of the gain landing on the least experienced. A productivity result, not a cost saving, and not a prediction about any other business.
03
What does survive is smaller, and much better. The figure beside this paragraph is a peer reviewed study of thousands of customer support agents, which found that giving them a generative AI assistant raised the number of issues resolved per hour, with almost all of the gain landing on the least experienced staff and very little on the most experienced. That is a measured result, published in a journal, about the exact kind of work this page asks you about.
It is also a productivity result and not a cost saving, and we are not going to convert it into one for you. Quietly turning a throughput number into a cost percentage is how most of the figures in the paragraph above got made in the first place.
04
What this arithmetic cannot tell you
- 01
It does not know your systems. Two companies with the same headcount and the same hours can be a six week build and a six month one, and the difference is usually whether the information is already in one place or scattered across four.
- 02
It treats every hour as the same hour. In real life, ten minutes lost eleven times a day is much harder to win back than one clean two hour block, and the clean block is normally the one that automates first. The calculator cannot tell those two apart. You can.
- 03
It assumes the whole year looks like the week you described. Most businesses have a season. If you typed your busy week, the yearly figure is high. If you typed your quiet one, it is low.
- 04
It says nothing about what a build costs, because no fee number appears anywhere on this site. The fee is a share of the measured gain. If there is no measured gain, there is no share.
- 05
And it cannot tell you whether the work should exist at all. Some of the hours you just counted are not waiting to be automated. They are waiting to be stopped: a report nobody reads, an approval step added after one bad month in 2019, a form filled in twice because two systems never got introduced. Stopping that work is a better answer than automating it, it needs no software, and it is one of the first things we look for.
05
What to do with the number
Send it to whoever owns the budget. The copy link button builds a link that carries your industry, your headcount, your hours and the areas you ticked, so the other person opens the same sum rather than a screenshot of it. Your hourly cost is left out of that link on purpose, and there is no setting that puts it back in.
Then argue with it. The most useful thing about a sum with its working shown is that somebody can disagree with one line of it instead of dismissing the whole thing. If your finance lead thinks 46 working weeks is wrong for your business, that is a real conversation and it takes about a minute, and the hours change with it, right there on the page.
Questions
What should you know before the first call?
- Is this a quote?
- No. This page has never seen your business and does not know what a build would involve. It multiplies the numbers you typed and shows every step so you can check it. A quote comes after a call and a diagnostic, not out of a form.
- Why does this stop at hours and not print a savings figure?
- We have not found a published figure we can stand behind for how much of this kind of work automation actually absorbs. Most of the numbers in circulation turn out to trace back to somebody selling something, so we are not putting one on this page to fill the gap. The hours are yours and they are right. What comes off them is a question for two weeks inside your business, not for a web page.
- Why is the answer in hours instead of money?
- Because hours are a fact about your business and money is not, until you supply a cost per hour. The hourly cost field is optional and starts empty. Left blank, the page carries no currency at all, which is the honest default for a number nobody has checked against your accounts.
- What happens if the result comes out small?
- The page says so, and tells you not to pay anyone to fix it. There is a printed floor, and below it the calculator states plainly that this is not worth automating yet and offers no next step. A calculator that can only return good news is an advert with a form on it.
- Does Praxis see the numbers typed in?
- No. The multiplication happens in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere. The copy link button builds a URL out of your industry, headcount, hours and ticked areas so you can send it on. The hourly cost is deliberately excluded from that link, and no code exists that writes it.
- Why is 46 working weeks the one assumption, and how can it be changed?
- 52 weeks a year, less about six weeks of holiday, public holidays and sick leave, gets to 46. It is the only assumption built into the arithmetic that is not a number you typed. If it is wrong for your business, use a different number of working weeks and redo the last line of the sum yourself. Everything else on the page is your own input, multiplied out in front of you.
Where this leads
This page is one part of the whole offer: how the automation gets built.
If the hours look worth a conversation
The next step is a call, not a proposal. You tell us how the work actually runs, and we tell you which parts of it can be taken over, which parts cannot be taken over yet, and what we would build first. The call is free and you leave with a plain written list either way. The fee, if there ever is one, is a share of the measured gain. If there is no measured gain, there is no share.
No obligation · a scoping conversation first