AI Didn't Replace Our People. It Made Them 23x More Valuable.
- Donny F. Lauderback
- Dec 10, 2025
- 3 min read
by Donny F. Lauderback, President, F2OnSite
Check out more from F2Onsite
Last year, one decision returned 23x its cost inside our business. That decision was AI.
The past 12 months, we spent about $12,000 on AI tools across our company.
Not per month, but in total including all AI platforms and training. We determined that we use over 20 AI platforms and solutions across our company on a regular basis!
We conducted an extensive survey of all our corporate employees who have access
to the systems and found out how they used AI, how much time it saved them, how it improved productivity and whether they were able to reduce or eliminate cost and how they avoid spending dollars on new services and solutions.
We then were able to calculate what we got in return for our investment, ie our ROI.
The Answer: At least $273,000 in verified financial impact.
That puts our return on investment at just over 23 times our AI spend.
And that number is conservative. Regardless, the ROI is huge.
This was not a guess, again we extensively surveyed our entire corporate team, accounting, finance, recruiting, human resources, sales and marketing. We looked at time saved, work avoided, legal spend reduction, and real operational impact. Then we applied real hourly costs to real workflow changes. And this Did Not Include our Field operations!
Here is what we found.
1. Time Is the First Place AI Pays You Back
Across our team, the average AI-enabled corporate employee saves about four hours per week using AI, while some save far more.
That’s not theoretical value, it’s real time we now redirect into delivery, sales, leadership, and growth.
2. Legal Spend Was Quietly Slashed
Since we operate in all 50 states and Canada, it’s a challenge to stay in full compliance with literally hundreds of unique local and state laws and regulations. That can be expensive. We reduced our outside legal expenditure dramatically.
In fact, this past year, we spent just $1,700 on outside legal.
That is not a typo.
Most of that reduction is directly tied to using AI for legal research, compliance knowledge, unique policy creation, basic document drafting, preparation, formatting, and early review before outside legal ever touches it.
That alone saved us between $23,000 and $36,000 in one year.
3. Our Verified Financial Impact
Here is the clean math.
$250,000 in labor productivity, cost avoidance and cost reduction recaptured$23,000 to $36,000 in legal cost avoidance.$273,000 to $286,000 in verified impactAgainst $12,000 in total AI spend
That is a 23x return on investment in one year.
And that does not include several major upside areas we did not even quantify yet, such as:
Quadrupled Marketing content creation.
Spent $0 on software development and bug fixes
Creative asset generation
Resume screening
Project scoping
Automated pricing
Better more detailed and expansive proposals
TranslationProcess documentation
Training development
All of that is happening now inside our business because of AI.
4. The Most Important Part
AI did not replace our people; not one position was eliminated due to the use of AI.
It removed friction.
It removed low value busy work. It removed repetition. It removed delays. It removed bottlenecks.
What remained is higher quality thinking, more extensive training, faster execution, cleaner communication, and better decisions.
This is how we scale value.
5. The Real Lesson for Business Owners
If you think of AI as a toy, you will get toy results.
If you think of AI as a line-item expense, you will underinvest.
If you think of AI as a capital efficiency engine, a margin expansion tool, and a labor multiplier, you will start asking the right questions.
We are no longer experimenting with AI.
It is now a permanent part of how our company operates.
Final Thought
We did not build an AI department. We also didn’t eliminate any positions, we simply built an AI powered workforce that is better than ever.
That difference matters.
