Business & money
AI vs Human Cost
The honest comparison includes review time. Once you price that in, the answer changes for about half of all tasks.
Monthly saving with AI
$2,009
- Human: hours / month
- 93.3 h
- Human: total cost
- $2,987
- AI: usage + licences
- $76
- AI: review time
- 28.2 h — $901
- AI: total cost
- $977
- Cost per unit — human
- $3.73
- Cost per unit — AI
- $1.22
- Annual difference
- $24,112
- Break-even wage
- $1.17 / h
Fine for routine tickets; escalations still need a person.
What most comparisons leave out
Review is not optional and it is not free. This model charges every AI run for the minutes it takes to read the output plus a quarter of the original task time as correction and re-prompting. That single line is the difference between a projection and a fantasy.
The break-even wage is the more durable number. Below it, a person is cheaper for this task; above it, the tool is. Wages move slowly and model prices fall, so a task sitting close to break-even today will cross the line within a year or two on its own.
Cost is not the whole decision. Latency, liability, customer perception and what happens when the vendor changes its pricing all belong in the same conversation, and none of them appear in a per-unit figure.