When a company compares an AI coworker to a hire, it compares two numbers: the salary and the subscription. That comparison flatters us for the wrong reason, and it hides the number that actually decides it.
#The salary is the small part
Take a finance assistant. Advertise the role, and the visible figure is the base salary. Then add what nobody puts in the business case:
- The gap
Before the req is approved. Weeks, sometimes a quarter, in which the work is still not being done.
- The hiring
Screening, four interviews, an offer, a notice period. Paid for in senior time rather than in cash, which is why it never shows up.
- The ramp
Three months before the work comes back without checking. This is the number that decides the comparison, and it is the one nobody writes down.
- The upkeep
One-to-ones, reviews, holiday, the odd bad month. Ordinary, and not free.
- The exit
Everything they learned about your customers leaves with them.
The last line is the one worth staring at. A person is a memory of your company that walks out of the building at some point. Every company accepts this as weather. It is not weather. It is the largest recurring cost in the list, and it is invisible because it never appears on an invoice.
#What we are actually selling against
Not the salary. The eleven weeks.
A coworker reads what your company already wrote and is useful in about forty minutes. That is not a claim about intelligence — it is a claim about the shape of the problem. Most of what a new starter spends three months learning is not skill. It is context: who the customers are, what was agreed with them, which rules are real, and who signs what.
That context is already written down in your company. It is in the ledger, the contracts, seven years of a shared inbox. A person has to be told it slowly by other busy people. A coworker reads it.
#Where a person still wins
We would rather say this than have you find it out in month two.
The standard lives in one head
If nobody can articulate what good looks like, a coworker cannot learn it, and asking it to try produces confident work that is subtly wrong.
The work is a relationship
A supplier who takes your call because they have known you for nine years is not a workflow.
It has never happened before
A first-time decision with no precedent in your documents is a person's job. A coworker is exceptional at the eleventh time and average at the first.
The honest framing is not replace the hire. It is: most teams are carrying a pile of work that is repetitive, well-documented and boring, and they are trying to solve it by hiring somebody who will be bored. Take that pile away, and the question of whether you need the hire answers itself — sometimes yes, and the person you hire gets a much better job.
#How to run the comparison honestly
Pick one role you were about to advertise. Then:
The third column is the useful one. It is the part of the job that is genuinely a person's, and it is almost always smaller than the job description implied — and occasionally much larger, which is a good thing to learn before you have paid a recruiter.
#The number, now that we have one
This post went up without a price, because ours was not settled and a figure we might revise in three months is worth less than nothing in a business case somebody is about to present.
It is settled now. A workspace is $99 a month on Pro and $499 a month on Business, or 20% less if you pay for the year. Pro includes four users. Business includes twenty users. The fee covers the workspace, with no separate charge per user. On top of that you pay for the work that ran, at what the model provider charges us, with nothing added.
Take a year of that, run the three steps above, and put the two columns next to each other. The pricing page shows the arithmetic, including where every salary figure came from.