What does an AI employee actually cost in the UK?

The honest starting point: a managed AI agent in the UK starts at around £349 a month, and the figure climbs with the number of people using it, the number of systems it touches, and how many agents you end up wanting.

That is the whole answer for a lot of businesses. The rest of this is what sits inside the number, and what to check before you compare it against anything else.

What "managed" is doing in that sentence

There are two quite different things being sold under similar words, and the price gap between them is the reason the market looks confusing.

Software you operate yourself. You buy access to a tool, and you connect it, configure it, write the instructions, and fix it when it drifts. Sticker prices here are low — often £20 to £100 a month. The real cost is the person doing that work, which is usually someone senior who was already busy.

A managed agent. Somebody else builds it, connects it, watches it and fixes it. You describe what you want done. Prices sit far higher because a person's time is inside the number.

Neither is wrong. But comparing the sticker price of one against the other is comparing a gym membership to a personal trainer.

What about "automation" — is that the same question?

Mostly yes, and the pricing works the same way, but it is worth separating because people arrive at this from two directions.

Classic automation connects things and moves data between them on a rule. When this happens, do that. Priced either as a one-off build — historically anywhere from a few hundred pounds for a single connection to several thousand for something involved — or as a monthly tool subscription in the tens of pounds, plus whoever maintains it.

An agent is given a job rather than a rule, and works out the specifics each time. It handles the cases a rule would break on: the invoice that was part-paid, the site that changed its hours, the job that turned into a different job.

The reason the monthly figures look so different is that rule-based automation is bought as software and an agent is bought as a managed result. If your work genuinely fits a fixed rule and never varies, classic automation is cheaper and you should buy that instead — we will say so. Most of the work people actually want moving is not that tidy, which is why it never got automated in the first place.

What our own pricing includes

Being specific, since we are asking you to compare: our packages start at £349 a month for one named agent, £749 for a team of up to five people with the agent connected to your systems, and £1,995 for multiple agents working together across a larger business.

Every package includes set-up, the connections, the training on your business, the ongoing changes when you want something different, and a human at our end who answers for it. There is no separate implementation fee and no per-connection charge.

The three costs people forget

The time to explain your business. Whatever you buy, somebody at your end has to say how things actually work. Budget a few hours in the first fortnight. This is the cost that is real in every option, including hiring a person, and it is the one nobody puts on a pricing page.

The cost of the thing going quiet. An agent that stops working correctly and does not tell you is worse than no agent, because you have stopped checking. Ask who notices, how fast, and what happens next. If the answer is "you'll spot it", price in the spotting.

Year two. Anything connected to your systems needs maintaining as those systems change. If a price only covers building the thing, the second year is a separate conversation you have not had yet.

How to sense-check any quote

Work out what the task costs you now. Not the annoyance — the hours, times a real hourly rate, times the weeks per year.

A part-time administrator in the UK on £26,000 pro rata for three days a week costs roughly £1,300 a month before employer's National Insurance, pension, holiday, equipment and the time spent managing them. That is the honest comparison for a lot of the work people hand to an agent, and it is worth doing properly rather than in your head.

If the number you get is smaller than the quote, the quote is wrong for you and you should say so. If it is much larger, you have found something worth doing.

When the answer is "not yet"

If the work you want automated changes every week and nobody can describe it twice the same way, the process is the problem and software will encode the confusion at speed. Sort that first. It is cheaper, and you may find the job shrinks.

If you want to see what the work would actually be in your business, tell us what you are dealing with and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth the money.