I've spent a lot of time working with HR and business leaders who can tell me exactly how many people work in their department, what their annual budget is, and how much they spent on software last year.

But when I ask what it costs to run one of their everyday processes, the answer usually requires a little detective work.

Consider something as ordinary as preparing a weekly staffing report.

Someone downloads data from one system, copies information into Excel, checks a few numbers, updates a chart, and emails the finished report to several managers. Occasionally, a number looks wrong, which sends someone back into the original files to figure out what happened.

Everybody knows the process takes time. But few people have calculated what that time costs.

Let's put some hypothetical numbers behind it.

Suppose four managers each spend 30 minutes every Friday preparing and reviewing their portion of a staffing report. At a loaded labor cost of $50 per hour, that routine consumes two hours and $100 every week.

Over 52 weeks, the organization spends $5,200 preparing one recurring report.

And that only accounts for the scheduled work. We haven't included corrections, follow-up questions, delayed decisions, or the time managers could spend doing something more valuable.

Now multiply that kind of routine across an entire organization. You can see why I get interested when someone tells me a task takes "only a few minutes."

This is where AI becomes a useful business analyst.

You can describe a manual process, provide a few estimates, and ask AI to break down the annual cost. It can help identify repetitive steps, calculate labor expenses, flag hidden work, and suggest where AI might reduce the effort.

I especially like connecting this exercise to AIQ Return on Intelligence™, specifically its Time Value ROI dimension. The idea is to measure how much low-judgment work we can reclaim and then redirect that capacity toward more valuable activities.

After all, saving two hours has limited value if we simply use those hours to attend another meeting that could have been an email.

Today's exercise takes one small manual process and gives it a price tag. Once you can see the numbers, you have a much better starting point for deciding how AI can change the way you work.

Let's go raise your AIQ.

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