AI automation vs hiring an admin: an honest cost comparison

What a hire costs in the 2026/27 tax year

Start at the legal floor, because that is the cheapest a hire can be. From April 2026 the National Living Wage for someone aged 21 or over is £12.71 an hour, as published on gov.uk.

Take a part-time admin working 20 hours a week, which is a realistic first hire for a small firm:

• Gross pay: 20 hours × 52 weeks × £12.71 = £13,218.40 a year.
• Employer National Insurance: 15% on earnings above the £5,000 secondary threshold under the 2026/27 rates on gov.uk, which is £1,232.76.
• Minimum employer pension: 3% of qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270 under The Pensions Regulator's automatic enrolment thresholds, which is £209.35.
• Total employer cost: £14,660.51 a year, or about £1,222 a month.

That total leaves out recruitment, a desk, a laptop, payroll software and your own time spent running payroll. Employment Allowance is worth checking with your accountant. It is £10,500 for 2026/27, and a company can claim it once it employs someone who is not a director, which in this example would remove the £1,232.76 of employer National Insurance and bring the monthly cost to about £1,119.

Scale it up and the numbers move quickly. The same person full-time at 37.5 hours a week on the minimum wage costs £24,784.50 in gross pay, £2,967.67 in employer National Insurance and £556.33 in pension. That is £28,308.51 a year, or £2,359.04 a month. Pay above the minimum, as most employers do, and the employer taxes rise with the salary. The Office for National Statistics put median gross annual earnings for full-time employees at £39,039 in April 2025, and at that salary the employer's National Insurance and pension add roughly £6,090, taking the annual cost to about £45,129.

One more figure is worth having. Statutory holiday is 5.6 weeks a year under gov.uk rules, so at 20 hours a week you pay for 52 weeks and get about 46.4 weeks of work. Spread across the hours actually worked, the 20-hour hire costs about £15.80 an hour, or £14.47 with the Employment Allowance applied. That last piece is our arithmetic on the figures above rather than a published statistic.

What an automation plan costs

Our own plans are on the pricing page: Starter at £129 a month and Professional at £299 a month. Starter covers one assistant, five integrations and 1,000 conversations a month. Professional covers five assistants, more integrations and 10,000 conversations. Done-for-you voice work is quoted at £150 to £350 a month, and implementation is scoped and quoted by hand rather than sold from a checkout. The calculator on that page works from a UK average monthly salary of £2,000 to £3,500 and adds employer National Insurance and pension on top, which is the same method used above.

Put next to the hire, Starter is roughly a tenth of the part-time admin at the minimum wage, and Professional is about a quarter. Against the full-time minimum-wage hire, Starter is about a twentieth and Professional about an eighth. Those ratios only hold for the work that repeats, which is the next thing to check.

What each side actually does

A person covers the whole week. They answer the phone and the inbox, chase a supplier, work out what a vague request means, deal with a customer who is upset, remember that one customer prefers Tuesdays, and sit in the building while it happens. They can also be handed something new, which no plan can do.

What we set up covers a defined list of repeated jobs. An assistant can answer when nobody is free, ask the same qualifying questions every time, write the enquiry into the system with the details your team needs, book the appointment, send the reminder, and hand the unusual case to a person with a summary attached. It keeps working at 3am and on a bank holiday, and it does not need training twice.

The list is short on purpose. Where a job needs judgement, negotiation or a professional opinion, it stays with a person. The aim is to reduce the number of times somebody has to stop what they are doing to move a routine request one step forward.

Where the comparison breaks down

• If your week is varied and little of it repeats, automation will not buy you a hire's worth of time. Changing the process may help more than buying a tool.
• If you have more enquiries than you can answer, the arithmetic above is the wrong frame for the decision. An assistant answers and qualifies. It does not decide whether to take the job or what to charge for it.
• Automation is not free to run. Budget an hour or two a month to check what it did and adjust the wording, and expect some setup work on your side at the beginning.
• A plan does not remove the need for someone to own the customer relationship, and it does not make a role disappear. It changes which parts of the role take up the day.

A sensible order to do things in

Most small businesses get further by automating the repeated intake and admin first, then hiring later if the work still needs a person. The order matters because automation makes the remaining work clearer: which requests repeat, which ones need a decision, and how much of the week each one takes.

Example scenario, describing how a small firm would organise the work rather than what happened for any client: a two-person plumbing business answers the phone between jobs, writes details on a pad, quotes in the evening and invoices at the weekend. Before hiring, that firm could put the phone and the enquiry trail into a defined process, so call details land in one place, the quote reminder goes out on time and the invoice is not written twice. If what is left is still more than two people can carry, the hire becomes a decision about capacity rather than a way of coping with a mess.

We have not put a client case study on this page. We are a small studio, we would rather show the arithmetic, and we will not write a story about a customer who does not exist. Our own line is the demo instead, and you can call it and judge it yourself.

What to do with these numbers this week

• Write down every job you did last week that followed the same steps as the week before.
• Time three of them.
• Multiply the minutes by how often they happen in a month. That figure is yours, and it is more useful than any industry average.
• Compare it with what a hire would actually spend their week on. If the honest answer is "not much of it", automating first is the cheaper experiment.

Then decide with the numbers in front of you. The free AI Automation Audit at amoskalets.com/ai-audit is a 30-minute conversation about where the hours go, and you leave with a written map of what could be automated, whether you buy anything or not. If you would rather hear the assistant before you talk to anyone, call +44 20 4577 1226 and ask it something awkward.