How much time goes on repetitive work — and how to cost it in your company
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The McKinsey Global Institute analysed how much work could be automated with already-demonstrated technology. Its finding: fewer than 5% of occupations can be fully automated, but around 60% of occupations have at least 30% of their activities automatable.
Correction note (August 2026): this article previously claimed that "a McKinsey study shows the average employee spends 2.1 hours a day" on automatable tasks. We could not confirm that wording in McKinsey's publications, so we have replaced it with the figure they do publish. The calculation below now runs on your own data rather than a borrowed average.
Source: McKinsey Global Institute, "A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity", January 2017. The important caveat: this is about automatable activities within a role, not roles disappearing.
What does it cost in your company?
We are not going to take an average off the internet and apply it to your business. The formula is simple and the variables are yours to set:
- hours per day × 22 days × 12 months = hours lost per year, per employee
- × your real hourly cost (gross salary plus contributions, divided by hours worked)
- × the number of employees doing that work
So you don't have to do it by hand, we've put it in an estimator that shows its formulas and assumptions. The result is an arithmetic estimate on your data, not a forecast.
Top 5 processes to automate FIRST
- Follow-up emails — automatic sequences based on customer actions
- Data entry — automatic sync between web forms and CRM
- Recurring invoicing — automatic generation and sending on fixed dates
- Daily/weekly reports — dashboards that update themselves
- Internal notifications — automatic alerts when a deal stalls or a deadline approaches
What automating these processes costs
It depends on how many systems have to be connected and how standardised your processes already are. We don't publish a one-size-fits-all price range and payback period — that would be exactly the kind of invented figure we have just removed from this article. We look at the actual process first, then work it out together; and if the numbers say it isn't worth it, we'll tell you that.