The 2026 maths: automate or hire?
A new hire costs more than their salary. Employer National Insurance is charged at 15% on earnings above the secondary threshold of £5,000 a year (GOV.UK, 2026/27), the National Living Wage rises to £12.71 an hour from April 2026 (GOV.UK), and auto-enrolment adds a minimum 3% employer pension contribution (GOV.UK) — costs that recur every year, indefinitely. A fixed-price automation is a one-off cost that keeps paying back long after it’s built.
| New hire (repetitive admin role) | AI automation | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | Recruitment + onboarding time | £4,000–£8,000 fixed sprint |
| Ongoing cost | Salary + employer NI + benefits, every year | Optional care plan from £300/month |
| Capacity | Fixed hours, holiday and sick cover needed | Runs continuously, no cover required |
| Ownership | — | You own the automation, on your own accounts |
What we automate
Quoting
Turning a job description or enquiry into a priced quote. Typically hours down to minutes once built, on Claude or a Make/n8n workflow.
Inbox triage
Sorting, tagging and drafting first responses to incoming email so a human only handles what actually needs judgement.
Proposals
Drafting a first-pass proposal document from a brief and your past examples, ready for a human edit rather than a blank page.
Reporting
Pulling numbers from your existing systems into a written summary on a schedule, instead of someone assembling it manually each week or month.
Customer service
First-line responses to common questions, with clean handoff to a human for anything outside the rules.
Data entry and admin
Moving information between systems that don’t talk to each other natively — the unglamorous work that eats the most hours with the least judgement required.
What do AI automation services cost?
- Audit — £1,500, refunded in full if we can’t find at least 10 hours a week of savings
- Implementation sprint — £4,000–£8,000 fixed, depending on scope
- Care plan — from £300/month, optional
Full detail on pricing.
How a 2-week sprint works
- Kickoff and mapping — we document the process as it actually runs today, not as the org chart says it runs.
- Build — we build the automation on your accounts using Claude, Make or n8n.
- Test on real data — using your actual jobs, emails or figures, not a demo dataset.
- Handover — the automation lives on your accounts, with documentation your team can read.
- Optional care plan — ongoing monitoring and small changes as your process evolves.
What tools do you build on?
Claude, Make and n8n — always on accounts you own. That matters because if you ever stop working with NeuralGen, the automation keeps running and you keep full control. We don’t build on proprietary platforms that only we can maintain.
When NOT to automate
Not every process should be automated. Low-volume tasks, work that needs real judgement, and processes that change weekly rarely pay back the build cost — we say so plainly in the audit rather than selling a sprint you don’t need. More detail in when not to automate.