It's what happens when everyone is compelled encouraged to “get good at AI,” and no one runs it. Answer five questions. See what AI BotRot is really costing you…
Fixing BotRot stops the bleeding. Running AI on purpose gives time back to every department. For your company, that's about a year in time you already pay for.
Ranges are planning estimates, not promises. We count recovered time at your payroll cost, so new revenue from sales is extra.
Your five answers set the rates below. Everything else comes from published studies or our stated assumptions, kept on the low side on purpose.
| Input | Value we use | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly cost | Employer cost per hour worked, wages plus benefits, for your industry (June 2026). The default is the private-industry average, $46.89 an hour, or about $97,500 a year | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| People hit by AI rework | 40% of employees | Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp, 2025 |
| Time to fix one bad piece of AI work | 2 hours | Same study |
| Bad pieces per person per month | From your answer to #2: 0.5, 1, 2, or 4 | Our assumption. Frustration means rushing, and rushing means misses. |
| Cost when an error reaches a customer | 3x the in-house fix | Our assumption, well under the 10x the 1-10-100 rule of quality cost suggests |
| Share of errors that reach customers | From #4: 5%, 20%, 35%, or 50% | Our assumption |
| Review time that slows work down | From #4: 2, 0.75, 0, or 0 hours per person per month | Our assumption |
| Duplicate work with no owner | From #1: 0.25 to 2.5 hours per person per month | Our assumption |
| Yearly staff turnover | 23% (1.9% a month) | BLS, quits rate |
| Time to rebuild a departed person's tools | 40 hours, less for each Yes in #3 | Our assumption |
| AI seat cost | $30 per employee per month, with the unproven share set by #5 | Our assumption of a typical business plan |
| Time AI gives back | 5.4% of work hours for people who use it | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2025 |
| Share of a rep's week spent selling | 30% | Salesforce State of Sales, via Landbase |
| Department sizes | Sales 15%, operations 45%, support 12%, marketing 5%, finance 5%, HR 3%, leaders 5% (leaders at 2x pay) | Our assumption for a typical small to midsize company |
| Time back by department | The low end of each range sits near the Fed's 5.4% average. The high end assumes AI is run on purpose. | Our assumption |
| What a fix recovers | 30% of the total | Our assumption, deliberately conservative |
| Install fee | $17,500 | Multi-Department Install |
Security stats: IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025. Profit stat: MIT NANDA, The GenAI Divide, 2025. Breach risk is not counted in your dollar total.
© Wes Schaeffer, The Sales Whisperer®, 2006-2026 · HANK AI, inspected by Meridian