The figure on the quote is the price of the project, not the price of the rollout. The gap between the two is typically 30–50%, and it is the part most companies only notice halfway through. Not because anyone hides it, but because most of the missing items do not arise at the supplier. They arise at your end.

The four items that make up the price of a pilot

The cost of automating one process fits into four boxes. Two are one-off, two are monthly. A miscalculation almost always comes from looking at the first box only, because that is the one printed on the quote.

There is a fifth item that never appears on a quote and is nonetheless real: your own internal time. On a pilot this is typically 10–20 hours. Collecting sample documents, talking through the exceptions, testing, giving feedback. It is not an optional part. If you leave it out, the workflow will not model your process but a generic one, and that difference can only be fixed later, at a higher price.

A model calculation: a 25-person company, quote preparation

The example below is a model calculation, not a client result. The inputs come from the middle of typical industry ranges, and every one of them can be checked against your own data.

The process: an incoming enquiry turned into a quote and sent out. Three people work on it, 90 enquiries a month, an average of 50 minutes each. After automation, the AI drafts the quote from previous quotes and the current price list, and a person checks it, corrects it and sends it: 20 minutes each.

One-off costs

Item	Amount
AI opportunity audit (credited against a pilot order)	€790 → €0
Building the pilot automation	€2,400
Half-day training	€990
Your own internal time (14 hours × €16)	€225
Total	€3,615

Monthly costs

Item	Amount
Licences (4 seats)	€90
Operations	€190
Total	€280 per month

The savings side: 90 enquiries × 30 minutes saved = 45 hours a month. The full employer cost of an office role in Slovakia and Hungary typically sits between €13–20 per hour; let us use €16. 45 × 16 = €720 a month.

That makes the monthly net 720 minus 280, or €440. Payback: 3,615 / 440 = 8.2 months. The first twelve months come to €8,640 saved against €6,975 in total cost, so €1,665 in the black. In year two, with no one-off items, it is €5,280.

Eight months. Not three weeks. Anyone promising three weeks either has not done the arithmetic, or has not done all of it.

When the calculation says no

The same process, at the same price, but with 30 enquiries a month instead of 90: 30 × 30 minutes = 15 hours, so €240 saved. The monthly cost is still €280. The monthly net is minus €40. This project never pays back, however long it runs, and no amount of good implementation fixes it, because the problem is the volume.

That gives you a simple threshold. A pilot is worth doing if the process frees up at least 20 hours a month. Below that, the licence and operations fees eat the entire benefit. At that point there are two workable routes: start with a higher-volume process, or push the monthly cost down with fewer seats, a simpler workflow, and no operations package for the first few months.

For a quick check you need three numbers: how many times the process runs each month, how long one run takes now, and how much of that would remain. The calculator takes you through it in a minute.

What not to automate

Not every expensive process makes a good pilot. Four cases where a person stays in the loop, even where the technology could do otherwise.

• Pricing and discount decisions. A machine can write the draft. A person signs off the final number, because a mistake here is money directly, and it does not surface on its own.
• Outgoing customer text with no review. A suggested reply, yes. Automatic sending, no. The review can shrink from 20 minutes to 20 seconds, but it cannot drop out of the process.
• Recruitment screening. Machine ranking of CVs is a high-risk use under the EU AI Act, with obligations of its own. A first pilot is not the place to take that on.
• Exception handling. If a third of the runs are one-off cases, automate the regular two thirds and leave the rest to people. Maintaining a workflow that tries to cover every case costs more than it returns.

A good first pilot is high-volume, repetitive, has a checkable output, and its errors are cheap. If any one of those is missing, look for another process. The technology is not what decides this. Those four conditions are.

What the calculation usually leaves out

1. Cleaning up the data. If half of your older quotes are scanned PDFs, the first step is not AI but tidying up. Typically 5–15 hours of internal work, once.
2. Running in parallel. For the first two to three weeks the old and the new method live side by side, until trust builds. So the saving does not start on day one but from roughly the second month.
3. Article 4 of the AI Act. Anyone using AI on behalf of the company needs adequate literacy, and has done since February 2025. Training is therefore not an extra line item but an obligation, and it is worth making it serve both purposes at once.
4. The cost of leaving. Ask up front: who owns the workflow, where does it run, and what happens to it if you change supplier. On your own infrastructure that cost is zero. On a closed platform it is not.

Work it out yourself in twenty minutes

Two formulas are enough.

Monthly net = (hours saved per month × hourly rate) − monthly licences − monthly operations

Payback in months = total one-off cost / monthly net

For the hourly rate, do not use gross salary but the full employer cost, divided by 160. And do not let the hours saved be an estimate: measure for a week how often the process runs and how long it takes. A week of measurement is more accurate than an hour of arguing about what you think it is.

If the payback lands inside 12 months, it is worth starting. Between 12 and 24 months, narrow the scope and recalculate. Above 24 months, do not start at all; find another process instead. Framed this way the decision takes twenty minutes, not three meetings.

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The numbers differ from process to process, but the structure is always the same. To work through it on your own processes, see the published prices or the other articles on the blog.