AI Guides › Money & Business
The Real ROI Question: What Would You Have Paid A Person To Do This?
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
People try to calculate AI's return on investment against abstract
productivity gains — vague percentages, "time saved" figures that don't
connect to an actual figure in pounds. There's a simpler, more honest question
that cuts straight through the abstraction.
The rule: the real ROI question isn't "how much faster am I," it's "what
would I have paid a person to do this specific task" — that number is
concrete, comparable, and usually settles the question fast.
The mechanism
- Name the specific task, not a category of work. Not "content
creation" — "drafting this particular weekly report."
- Price a human doing exactly that task, realistically — a freelancer's
rate, an assistant's hourly cost, whatever the honest market comparison
is.
- Compare that number to your actual AI cost for the same task — not
your whole subscription, just the portion this task represents.
- Do this per task, not once for your whole subscription. Some tasks
will clear the bar easily; others won't, and averaging across all of them
hides which is which.
- Revisit the comparison periodically — both the human rate and the
tool's capability shift over time.
What to skip
Skip comparing against a full-time salary divided into an hourly rate — that
comparison answers a different question (could this replace a job) than
the one that actually matters for a single task (what's this task worth to
get done). And skip stopping at a single overall "I saved X hours this
month" figure without connecting it to what those hours were actually
worth.
Guardrails
- This method prices the task, not the judgement and accountability that
still sit with you — a cheap task done quickly still needs the same
review as one done slowly.
- Some tasks are worth doing even at a poor ROI on this narrow measure,
because they unblock something else that matters more — treat this as one
input to a decision, not the whole decision.
- The comparison is only honest if the AI-assisted result is genuinely
comparable in quality to what a person would have produced — if it's
faster but meaningfully worse, that's not actually the same task.
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