Three Ways I Cut Costs With AI In My Own Business

Everyone wants to talk about what AI could do. I would rather talk about what it actually did to our own cost base, because we ran the experiment on ourselves before we ran it on anybody else.

Three places it landed. None of them were the places I expected when we started.

One: outsourcing became AI agents

We used offshore virtual assistants. Plenty of Australian businesses do, and for a long time the maths was obvious — the hourly rate was lower, so the work went overseas.

Here is the part people miss. That hourly rate is not going down. It has not gone down for years, and there is no reason to expect it to. Meanwhile the cost of a capable AI subscription keeps falling and the capability keeps climbing. The two lines crossed.

We replaced that VA work with agents and it came out ahead on both axes — cost and quality. The quality part surprised me more than the cost part. An agent does not have a bad day, does not need the same instruction re-explained on Monday, and does not quietly stop doing the bit of the process it never understood.

What it does need is a documented process and someone checking the output. That is not free. It is just cheaper than the alternative, and you own it afterwards.

Two: staffing changed shape

This is the one people get nervous about, so let me be precise about what happened.

The roles that went were the roles whose actual job was moving information between parts of the business. Take a thing out of one system, reformat it, put it into another system. Chase the person who has not sent the form. Retype the numbers into the report.

That is not a career. It is a queue.

Those roles are gone, and the budget went into engineering and design instead — people building things rather than shuffling things. The staff doing that work retrained into the new roles. That mattered to me. If your AI story ends with "and then we made people redundant," you have taken the cost out and thrown the knowledge away with it. The person who spent two years moving information between your systems understands your business better than almost anyone. Put them somewhere that uses it.

Three: the two kinds of waste

This is where most of the money actually was, and neither of them has a line item in your accounts.

Translation waste

Translation is the work of taking something that already exists and saying it again in a different format for a different audience.

A conversation with a client becomes a scope. The scope becomes a proposal. The proposal becomes a quote. The quote becomes a project plan. The project plan becomes an agenda. Every one of those is the same information wearing a different hat, and every one of them used to cost a person an hour or three.

We run that off Teams transcripts and templates now. The transcript is already there. The template already encodes what a good proposal looks like. The gap between them is exactly the kind of work AI is genuinely good at — no judgement call, no new information, just faithful reformatting.

Verification waste

Verification is checking that something is right before it goes out the door. Code review. Test results. Compliance checks. Documentation.

We put an AI pass in front of the human pass. The agent does the first sweep, the human reviews what it found and what it missed.

This is the one I would point to if you only take one thing from this article, because it is the only one where the quality goes up, not just the cost down. A tired human reviewing the fortieth document of the week misses things. A first-pass agent does not get tired, and the human it hands to is now reviewing a shortlist instead of a haystack. We catch more, not less, and it takes less time.

What this does not mean

It does not mean point an agent at your business and wait.

Every one of these three worked because the process underneath was already documented, already repeatable, and already had a human over the output. The two that did not have that — the ones I have not written about here — went nowhere and cost me time. I have written separately about how to build a genuinely bad AI agent, and every item on that list is something I have done.

Start with the translation waste. It is the least risky, the easiest to measure, and it is sitting in every business I walk into.

If you want to work out where yours is, come and have a chat with us — or get this kind of thinking weekly.