This comparison is usually made dishonestly, by an agency, in the agency's favour. So here it is with the parts that do not flatter us included. Sometimes the right answer is to hire someone, and knowing which situation you are in is worth more than any automation.
The arithmetic, using your numbers
Do not use anyone's example figures, including these. Use yours. But the shape of it looks like this:
- A person doing a repetitive process: fully loaded cost, every month, forever, covering roughly a quarter of the hours in a week and none of August.
- An automation doing the same process: a one-off build in the $2,500-9,000 range depending on scope, plus a small running cost, covering every hour there is.
- The crossover is usually a few months of the equivalent salary. If your process genuinely takes two hours a week, automating it is a hobby, not an investment.
- The number that decides it is not the salary, it is the hours. Count them honestly before you compare anything.
Where automation clearly wins
- High volume, low judgement. Classifying, routing, extracting, following up. A transport marketplace we worked with was manually triaging hundreds of emails a day; automated classification runs at 95% accuracy for about €0.21 a month.
- Anything where speed is the value. Responding to a lead at 3am is not something you can hire for at a sensible price.
- Work that is boring enough that people quietly stop doing it properly. Follow-up sequences are the classic case: attempt four is where the money is and attempt four is what humans skip.
- Processes that need to be identical every time. Consistency is what software is for.
Where you should hire a person instead
These are real, and an agency that will not name them is not being straight with you.
- The process is not stable yet. Automating a process you are still figuring out just freezes a bad version of it in code. Do it by hand until it stops changing weekly.
- The judgement is the job. Negotiation, complex diagnosis, anything where the answer depends on reading a person.
- Low volume. Below a certain threshold the build cost never pays back and you have added a system to maintain for nothing.
- You need someone who can also do the other nine things. A person is general-purpose. That flexibility is worth real money in a small team, and an automation has none of it.
The answer is usually both
The framing of automation versus hiring is mostly false. What actually happens in the companies where this works is that the automation absorbs the repetitive volume and the person moves up to the work that needed a person all along. Nobody gets replaced; the job gets better. If a proposal is pitched to you primarily as headcount reduction, be sceptical of it on the numbers alone, because those savings tend to be the ones that never materialise.