An answer counter measures AI activity, not business value. If an assistant generates drafts that employees must rewrite, it can increase workload. Evaluate completed work at an acceptable quality level, including review and correction time.
Define the unit of useful output
Sales might count an approved proposal, support a resolved request, and internal search a verified answer. Do not combine these into one attractive total. Their quality requirements and consequences of failure differ.
Measure the current process on comparable assignments, then measure the assisted process. Account for input difficulty: a short standard enquiry is not equivalent to an unusual specification running to many pages.
An illustrative time calculation
Suppose preparing a document normally takes 20 minutes. With AI, an employee spends 5 minutes providing input, 8 reviewing and 3 correcting. Human work totals 16 minutes. The difference is 4 minutes, not 15. These are hypothetical figures explaining the method, not AI Office deployment results.
For 100 accepted documents in a period, that represents a potential 400 minutes released. Released time does not automatically become reduced expenditure: identify the useful work it enables. Repeat enquiries and substantial errors may change the calculation.
Include the surrounding effort
- Preparing and maintaining the knowledge collection. - Operating the station, recovery arrangements and user support. - Evaluating model and integration updates. - Downtime and the effort required for a manual fallback.
Make the decision with reviewers
Discuss findings with employees who check the output daily. The main benefit may be consistent document structure and fewer forgotten fields rather than faster writing. A workflow may also remain too infrequent to justify dedicated automation. Both are legitimate findings: a pilot should inform a decision, not prove a predetermined savings figure.