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Cost

How much does AI automation cost a business?

There is no useful single figure, because the cost of automating a job is driven almost entirely by how many systems it has to touch and how inconsistent the inputs are. What you can do before speaking to anybody is understand the shape of the cost, so you can tell a complete proposal from an incomplete one.

Last checked 19 September 2026

Cost has four parts, and most quotes show one #

Whoever you speak to, and whatever they build with, the money goes to the same four places. Knowing the list is enough to read any proposal properly.

  • Working out the job One off

    Establishing what actually happens now, including the exceptions. It is the part that most determines whether the rest is wasted.

  • Building it One off

    The work itself, and connecting it to the systems you already run. It is driven by the number of connections more than anything else.

  • Running it Monthly

    Software subscriptions, and usage that scales with volume. It moves with how busy you are.

  • Keeping it working Monthly or on demand

    Fixing it when something it depends on changes. It never reaches zero.

The last of the four is the one that gets left out, and it is not optional. Everything an automation touches keeps changing: suppliers alter their software, formats shift, models are retired and replaced. That subject has its own page in what happens when the tools change underneath you.

What actually drives the number up #

Two jobs that sound equally simple can differ by an order of magnitude, and the reasons are consistent.

  • The number of systems involved. One system is a configuration change. Three systems that were never designed to speak to each other is a project. Count the places the person currently has to look, because that count is the best single predictor of cost.
  • How consistent the input is. A form somebody filled in is cheap. An email written by whoever felt like writing it is not, because the work is in handling the tenth version nobody anticipated.
  • How many exceptions there are. The straightforward path is rarely the expense. Businesses routinely describe a job in a sentence and then list nine special cases when asked, and the special cases are the build.
  • How much it matters when it is wrong. Work that touches customers or money needs checking, logging and a way to reverse things, and that is real effort rather than an afterthought.
  • Whether anyone can say how the job runs. If the process has to be discovered and agreed before it can be built, that discovery is part of the cost.

The side of the ledger you can already measure #

You cannot know the cost of the fix before anyone has looked at the job. You can know, quite precisely, what the job costs you now, and that is the number that decides whether the conversation is worth having at all.

Do it properly and use the employer cost of an hour rather than a wage. For the 2026 to 2027 tax year an employer also pays Class 1 National Insurance and a minimum workplace pension contribution on top of the salary, and statutory paid holiday means the working year is shorter than the calendar one, so every remaining hour carries more of that salary.

15%

Employer Class 1 National Insurance on earnings above £5,000 a year

GOV.UK, rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027

3%

Minimum employer pension contribution on qualifying earnings

GOV.UK, workplace pensions

5.6 weeks

Statutory paid holiday

GOV.UK, holiday entitlement

Our cost of admin time calculator does that arithmetic from figures you type in, and the workings are set out on how we work out the numbers.

How to read a proposal without understanding the technology #

You do not need to evaluate the method. You need to see whether the proposal is complete.

  1. Does it name the job and the current volume?

    A proposal that describes capabilities rather than your specific job has not looked at your business.

  2. Does it separate the one off cost from the monthly one?

    And does the monthly figure include somebody fixing it, or only the software licences?

  3. Does it say what happens to the cost if your volume doubles?

    Some running costs scale with usage and some do not.

  4. Does it say what you own at the end?

    That question is worth asking before you sign rather than after, and it is covered in who owns what gets built.

  5. Does it say what is excluded?

    A proposal with no exclusions has not been thought about.

The cheapest answer is often not a project #

Worth saying plainly, from a consultancy that sells these projects: a meaningful share of repeated admin turns out to be a connection that was never made or a setting nobody turned on. Establishing that costs an afternoon, and it is the right thing to rule out first.

The patterns where that applies are set out in when not to automate something.

Questions people ask

Why will nobody give me a price for AI automation?
Because the cost is driven by how many systems the work has to touch and how messy the inputs are, and neither is knowable from a description. A supplier who quotes before seeing the job is quoting for an imagined version of it, which is how projects end up being repriced halfway through.
Is it a one off cost or a monthly one?
Both, always. There is a cost to build the thing and a cost to keep it running, and the second one never goes away because the systems it depends on keep changing. A proposal with only a build price is an incomplete proposal.
What is the cheapest thing I can do first?
Usually nothing that involves buying software. Checking whether the repeated work exists because two systems are not connected, or because a setting was never turned on, costs an afternoon and resolves a meaningful share of cases.
How do I know whether it was worth it?
Decide the measure before you start, and make it hours on a named job rather than a general sense of things being smoother. If nobody wrote down what the job cost beforehand, there is no honest way to say afterwards whether it improved.

Where these numbers come from

  1. GOV.UK, Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027 , read 19 September 2026 . Employer Class 1 National Insurance at 15 per cent of earnings above the £5,000 secondary threshold.
  2. GOV.UK, Workplace pensions: what you, your employer and the government pay , read 19 September 2026 . Minimum employer contribution of 3 per cent of qualifying earnings.

Last checked 19 September 2026.

Our workings are on the methodology page .

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