AI agent or another hire — the honest maths

Hire when the work needs judgement, relationships or hands. Use an agent when the work repeats, follows a rule, and happens more often than a person can keep up with. Most small businesses have both kinds of work and treat all of it as a hiring problem.

The two-question test

Take the task you are about to hire for and ask:

1. Does it repeat in the same shape more than ten times a week?
2. Could you write down how to do it in a page?

Two yeses, and you are looking at an agent. One yes, you are looking at an agent plus a person to catch the exceptions. Two nos, hire — and stop reading.

The numbers, side by side

For a queue taking one person 8 hours a week at a €35 loaded hourly cost:

• Doing nothing: €1,213 a month of staff time, and it still slips.
• Part-time hire: €1,200+ a month for set hours, plus recruiting, training and cover.
• Agent: setup once, then per result — €45 in a quiet month, capped at €350–500 in a busy one, working every hour of every day.

The interesting number is not the difference. It is what the person does with the 8 hours back. If those hours go to billable work or to selling, the agent pays for itself twice.

Where hiring still wins

• First-time judgement calls. An agent should escalate anything it has not seen before. Someone has to be there to catch it.
• Relationships. The client who needs a phone call from a human is not a queue.
• Physical work. Obvious, and worth saying.
• Work that changes every week. If the process is still being invented, automating it just locks in a bad version.

The mistake to avoid

Do not automate the queue that annoys you most. Automate the queue that costs the most hours. They are usually different, and the second one is where the money is.

What good looks like after a month

Your team should be able to say three things: I stopped doing that, it has not embarrassed us, and I can see what it did. If the first is true and the second two are not, you bought the wrong thing.

The right question is never "person or machine". It is "which parts of this job should never have been a person's job".