AI ROI calculator — estimate what an AI rollout is actually worth.

How to use it

• People in scope. The knowledge workers whose week the system would genuinely touch — not the whole company.
• Hours saved per person. A realistic weekly figure for drafting, searching, summarising, ticket triage and reporting.
• Fully-loaded hourly cost. Salary plus on-costs, divided by working hours — the true cost of an hour of that person's time.
• Realistic adoption. The share of the team actually using the system each week. We rarely model above 70% in year one.

How the estimate is calculated

The figure is deliberately simple: people × adoption × hours saved × fully-loaded hourly cost, across 48 working weeks a year. It measures freed capacity — the time an AI system gives back to a team — not a guaranteed cash saving.

It is intentionally conservative. It excludes revenue gained from faster response times, fewer errors, better customer experience and the work that only becomes possible once a team has the headroom. Those are real, but they need your numbers to estimate honestly — which is what the AI Readiness Diagnostic is for.

What this calculator is not

It is not a quote and not a promise. Freed capacity only becomes value when a business chooses to use it — to take on more work, shorten lead times, or redeploy people to higher-value tasks. A sensible adoption figure matters more than an optimistic one: a modest, real rollout that people actually use beats an ambitious one that they do not.