“It’s so expensive”.

I have heard this again and again in recent months when talking to potential customers about AI. Let me put the question another way.

‘Give me EUR 17,000 and I’ll give you back at least EUR 100,000 within the first year – what do you say?’.

‘You’re crazy – this can only be a risky, insane investment’.

But it’s not … and in this blog series, I’m going to show you why using real-life use cases. It will involve a bit of maths, but only basic school maths. And it will be a little controversial …

Here is our first equation:

Time = money

Let’s first calculate this equation for humans – those who answer the calls, handle the emails and so on. We also need to make some assumptions.

Let’s start with the right-hand side of the equation for a human being:

In Germany, employer contributions amount to around 20 % in addition to gross salary.

What do I mean by overheads? Things like office rent, the occasional purchase of new PCs, electricity, telephone, software, cleaning the office and so on. In short, everything that needs to exist and be paid for so that the company can exist and people can actually work there, which can be passed on to all employees in some way. Here I have assumed 20 %. Sure – that can vary, but I think 600,- EUR per month is pretty reasonable

Let’s move on to the left-hand side of the equation – how much time do we get from a person? Again, some assumptions, but reasonable ones:

With our first equation and some simple maths we get:215 days per year = 50400 EUR1 Day = 234,32 EURAssuming an 8 hour day with no breaks and a 100% work rate during the 8 hours (you can decide if that’s reasonable!) we get:1 Hour = 29,29 EUR1 Minute = 0,49 EUR

Now let’s move on to our first use case. Typical conversations in contact centres for print media could include the following use cases:

• I have not received my newspaper

• I am on holiday, please do not deliver my newspaper from/to (dates)

• Please send my newspaper to this address

Or in a technical support centre in first-level support, it could simply be a matter of creating a ticket in the ticket system that contains the problem and a description of the problem. And maybe read out some FAQs that could help solve the problem.

Or book a table in a restaurant. Or make an appointment at a doctor’s surgery.

Almost every business area has simple, trivial tasks that need to be completed dozens of times or more per day, and the list goes on and on.

These usually end up as typical 3-minute calls to a call centre, and are handled by humans there. Each such call that is handled by a human would therefore cost money:

1 call (3 minutes) = EUR 1.47

A well-trained jtel AI voice bot can easily perform all of the above tasks. Let’s calculate what a 4-channel jtel voice bot would cost:

The costs for the voice services are approximate as they cannot be calculated exactly – they are based on the actual usage time of the service. For speech recognition, this is the time the bot ‘listens’ to the caller, and for text-to-speech, how long it ‘speaks’ to the caller. This figure is based on real voice bots in use, handling around 5000 calls per month, and will be sufficient for our purposes, as you will soon see. Here we also assume that the customer does not have a jtel system. For existing customers, the cost would be even lower as not all of the above licences would be required. Let’s crunch some numbers:

Wow! What’s happening here?

Firstly, I assume the bot is dumb and can only do one job. If only one call comes in per month and that’s all the bot can do, then the entire cost of the bot is applied to that one call. If two calls come in, the figure is 50% of the bot’s total cost and so on.

For the humans, I assume they will be doing other things for the rest of the day. So the cost for the human for just one call per month is EUR 1.47, and for the bot it’s a whopping EUR 1476.

In the real world, however, things are different. A jtel bot can handle thousands of calls per month. But humans can’t – and you can see that for yourself. Somewhere between 2500 and 5000 calls per month we will clearly need more than one human, and over 10000 even more. Not so with the bot.

Assuming an 8-hour day and the same assumptions as for humans (no breaks – 100% productivity), the voice bot can handle 640 calls per day – or well over 13,000 calls per month based on 21 working days.

But the voice bot doesn’t actually need any breaks and works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It can actually process a maximum of 1920 calls per day or an impressive 58400 calls per month or a gigantic 700,800 calls per year.

Looking at the graph again, we see that the turnover point is around 1000 calls per month. So if you have 1000 calls per month, you can have the voice bot do the work and the bot has saved the humans 50 hours of labour.

Now comes the controversial part. Based on our original equation:

Time = Moneyyou can choose what you want to do:

• use the bot to literally give you more time so people can do more productive and complex things

• or use the bot to save money by having fewer people in the first place

I am personally a fan of option 1.

In conclusion: Is it a crazy, risky investment?

Well, I don’t think so. I think you’d be crazy not to invest. Because you can always earn more money through hard work, but the time is gone – forever.