Business & money
AI Headcount Savings Calculator
How much capacity AI really frees on a team this size — after adoption gaps, review time and tool cost are taken out.
Capacity freed
1.6 FTE
About 13.7% of the team's working hours, after review and rework are deducted.
- Fully loaded cost per person
- $93,600
- Total team cost
- $1,123,200/yr
- Gross value of freed time
- $153,317/yr
- Tooling
- −$5,040/yr
- Net, ongoing years
- $148,277/yr
Net first year
$133,277
Rollout pays back in about 1.2 months.
Meaningful. Around one to two roles' worth of capacity — best spent on the backlog nobody has time for.
Freed hours are not the same as removed roles
Saving fifteen percent of everyone's week does not produce a vacant seat. It produces fifteen percent more capacity spread thinly across the whole team, which usually gets absorbed by the backlog before anyone notices. Treating that as a headcount cut is how automation programmes lose the trust of the people who have to make them work.
This model already deducts a third of the theoretical saving for prompt-writing, checking and rework, because that is where most real deployments land. Figures are directional planning estimates, not financial or employment advice.