GuildBuild Inc.
← All insights

AI business value

What is AI actually worth? Start with hours, quality, and cost.

A 15% productivity benchmark is a useful question, not your forecast. Here is how to build a business case your team can test.

4 min readGuildBuild Team
AI business valueProductivityAI evaluation
In this article

A useful number has a denominator

In a study of 5,172 customer-support agents, AI assistance increased issues resolved per hour by 15% on average. Results differed across workers. That is evidence about a specific workflow, not a universal saving that can be applied to your whole payroll.

Another experiment spanning 66 firms and 7,137 workers found that active users spent two fewer hours on email each week in its later months. It did not establish a broader change in task output. The working paper also discloses that some authors worked for Microsoft, the maker of the tool studied.

Estimate capacity before you promise savings

Take a recurring task and record how many people perform it, how long it takes, and how frequently it happens. For an illustrative planning example, 10 people spending five hours a week on reporting would recover 15 team-hours a week if a pilot achieved a 30% net time reduction. Over 48 working weeks, that is 720 hours of capacity.

The 30% is an assumption to test, not a GuildBuild result. Include time checking and correcting output. Recovered capacity only becomes financial value when you know how it will be used; it does not automatically remove payroll costs.

Figure 01Planning example

From reporting time to recovered capacity

  1. Baseline

    50 team-hours a week

    Multiply 10 people by 5 reporting hours per person per week.

  2. Pilot assumption

    15 team-hours recovered per week

    A 30% net reduction in 50 hours recovers 15 hours. Include time spent checking and correcting the output when you measure the reduction.

  3. Annual capacity

    720 team-hours over 48 weeks

    Multiply 15 hours by 48 working weeks. Decide which work could use the recovered time before assigning a financial value.

Illustrative arithmetic using the article’s planning assumptions. Measure the net reduction in your pilot before using this estimate in a budget.

Give the pilot four acceptance measures

  • Time: minutes per completed task, including review and exceptions.
  • Quality: share accepted without rework, plus the severity of mistakes.
  • Cost: delivery, model usage, licences, maintenance, and human supervision.
  • Adoption: the share of eligible work people actually complete through the new workflow.

Compare similar tasks across the baseline and pilot. Record the sample size and observation period, and investigate whether harder cases were left out. Set the acceptance threshold with the process owner before the pilot begins.