What does an AI employee cost per hour?

From about 96p an hour, and the working is short enough to check on the way past. A managed AI employee runs from £700 a month. An average month holds 730 hours, being the 8,760 hours in a year divided by twelve. £700 divided by 730 is about 96p. That is the floor, and everything else in this post is about why the divisor is the interesting part.

We publish the divisor because it is where an hourly figure is usually bent. Choose the hours generously and the same fee reads as a bargain. Choose them narrowly and it reads as expensive. The only defensible choice is the one that matches the hours you are actually buying.

Because the fee covers every hour in the month. A managed AI employee runs from £700 a month, an average month holds 730 hours, being the 8,760 hours in a year divided by twelve, and the employee is at work in all of them. That gives a floor of about 96p an hour. A smaller divisor would be describing a shift pattern nobody is paying for.

Here is the alternative, so you can see the size of the distortion. Count a forty-hour week across fifty-two weeks and you get 2,080 hours in a year. Twelve months at £700 is £8,400, and dividing that by 2,080 prints about £4.04 an hour. Same fee, four times the rate, and a figure that quietly deletes every evening and weekend from the year. The evenings and weekends are the hours most firms bought the employee for.

Yes, because setup lands inside it. Setup runs from £3,000, so a first year comes to about £11,400, which across 8,760 hours is about £1.30 an hour. From the second year the setup has already been paid and the figure returns to about 96p. Quoting the lower number for year one would be flattering and wrong.

Spread over the calendar instead of the clock, the steady-state figure is about £23 a day. The same fee looks different depending on the unit you divide it into, which is exactly why the unit should be stated every time a rate is quoted. All five readings below are the same money.

Because it is divided out of a from price. £700 a month is where the range begins, and what moves it is how much of the work the employee takes on, how many of your systems it has to reach into, and how much of your own material it has to read before it can answer anything. Every engagement is scoped and quoted in writing before work begins, so treat the hourly figure as a floor you can plan against.

The full fee table, shown in your local currency, is on the pricing page, and that page is the one to quote if somebody asks you what this costs. The figures here are the same anchors divided differently.

The setup that made it possible, and the work it was never scoped to do. The rate buys one role working inside scripts you approved, and anything outside that scope goes to a named person on your team. It also says nothing about whether the role was worth having in the first place. A cheap hour spent on work nobody needed is still money spent.

It is worth being blunt about the second half of that. An hourly rate makes any purchase sound reasonable, because the unit is small. The question that decides whether the money is well spent is whether the role has real work waiting for it, which is a question about how many enquiries your firm currently answers late or not at all.

Only roughly, and only where both sides count the same hours. An hourly figure for an AI employee covers all 8,760 hours of the year, including the evenings and weekends when enquiries arrive and no desk is staffed. A salaried role covers a working week and carries employer costs, cover, and recruitment on top of the wage. The comparison that settles it is what each option does to the work you are currently losing, which is a question about your own enquiry volume.

We have set the two options side by side with the salary side sourced in AI employee vs hiring staff, which is the piece to read if the decision in front of you is a staffing one. This post exists so that the hourly figure in that comparison is one you can check for yourself.

An hourly rate is an input, and the output is what the role recovers. Take the enquiries you answer late or never each month, the share you would normally win, and the value of an average new client. Set that against £700 a month and the answer is usually obvious in either direction. The ROI calculator runs the same sum with deliberately conservative assumptions and shows its working, so the figure you leave with is yours.

So ask whoever quotes you an hourly rate which divisor they used, ours included. A supplier counting only office hours is pricing cover you did not buy, and a supplier who will not say which hours they counted has answered the question anyway. Every figure on this page is a floor, and none of them is a quote.