AI Automation ROI Calculator

It is an indicative model, not a quote. The two inputs that move the result most — how much of the task can genuinely be automated, and what the build actually costs — both depend on specifics this tool cannot see, above all how clean and consistent your source data is. What the calculator is good for is sorting candidates: it will reliably tell you whether a task is in the right order of magnitude to be worth automating, and it will tell you clearly when it is not.

Because nobody works 52 weeks a year. Four weeks of annual leave plus public holidays and typical sick leave puts most Australian employees close to 46 productive weeks. Using 52 would inflate every annual saving by around 13% — a small dishonesty that compounds into a badly wrong business case.

Automation is not a one-off purchase. Once it is live you pay for licences and API or inference usage, monitoring, and the ongoing work of handling changes when a supplier alters a document format or a system gets updated. Eighteen per cent of build cost per year is a reasonable planning figure for a maintained workflow. A model that ignores running costs will show a payback that never arrives in reality.

The calculator applies a realisation factor of 80% to the theoretical saving, because recovered time is rarely converted into productive work one-for-one. This matters most when a saving is spread thinly — twenty people each getting fifteen minutes back is far harder to convert into real capacity than one person getting a full day back. If your saving is concentrated on a few people, the true figure will sit at the optimistic end.

Take it seriously — it is usually correct, and finding out here costs nothing. The most common reasons are that too few hours go into the task to justify a build, or that the build is being scoped too ambitiously for a first project. Look for a task with more total hours across more people, or a simpler approach: for many businesses a properly configured and trained Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout covers a lot of ground at a fraction of a custom build.

Yes. We work with businesses across Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, the Central Coast and Port Stephens on document processing, workflow automation, Microsoft 365 Copilot rollouts and AI-assisted analytics — and we secure what we build, which matters because the account an automation runs under is exactly the kind of access attackers look for. If the numbers here look promising, we will test the approach against your real documents before you commit to anything.