We get asked this question every other week. 'Is AI follow-up actually cheaper than just hiring someone, or is this another tech-tax pretending to save money?' Fair question. So we ran the numbers properly across three scenarios for a typical UK trade doing 100 inbound leads per month.
The three scenarios
Imagine a Bath bathroom fitter, 100 leads a month from Meta and Google, average job value £14,000. Below is what each setup actually costs over twelve months — the all-in cost, not just the headline price.
Scenario A · The owner does it themselves
No tooling. Phone, WhatsApp, a Google Sheet. The cost looks like zero. It is not. We benchmarked this with three trade owners last year. Each spent about 90 minutes a day handling lead follow-up. At £45/hour opportunity cost — roughly what a senior tradesperson bills out at — that is £16,400 per year. Plus a measurable conversion drop because half the leads got responses 4+ hours late.
Scenario B · Hire a part-time admin
£14/hour, 20 hours a week, plus NI and pension. About £18,000 per year all-in. Better response times, but only during their hours. Leads in the evening still wait until morning. And you now manage a person.
Scenario C · CRM with AI follow-up
Our typical Growth Bundle stack: GoHighLevel-equivalent CRM, AI classifier, SMS and WhatsApp automation, calendar embed. Setup £2,000 one-off, £100/month thereafter. £3,200 in year one, £1,200 in year two and beyond.
- Owner-only · Year 1
- £16,400
- Part-time admin · Year 1
- £18,000
- AI follow-up · Year 1
- £3,200
- AI follow-up · Year 2+
- £1,200
Where the AI setup actually wins
It is not just the lower cost. The AI setup responds in under 60 seconds, every time, including 11pm on a Saturday. We have measured the conversion lift on this specifically. Replying within five minutes versus thirty minutes lifts the chance of qualifying that lead by a factor of about ten in trade-services contexts. The AI does not blink at this.
Where AI loses
It loses on edge cases. Tone-deaf moments. Misreading what an upset customer needs. The fix is not 'do not use AI.' The fix is to keep a human in the loop on flagged conversations, and to write your prompts so the AI escalates on uncertainty rather than guessing. Run shadow mode for two weeks where you see every drafted message before it sends. After that, you will trust about 85% of them and be relieved.
When traditional CRM still makes sense
- , You have a salaried admin who is good and you trust them
- , Your average job value is over £50k and every lead deserves human first-touch
- , You are in a regulated trade where compliance language matters
- , Your customer base is mostly repeat and not lead-driven
AI follow-up does not replace a human. It replaces the version of the owner doing follow-up at 10pm on a Tuesday after a 12-hour day on site.
Luca Planchais
If you are a UK trade doing more than 30 leads a month, the math on AI follow-up is not close. The harder question is whether your current funnel is good enough that faster follow-up is the bottleneck. If you only get 8 leads a month, fix the funnel first. If you get 50+ and miss half of them, the AI pays back inside a quarter.