Before you hire for the busywork, price the seat

Recruiting one non-executive employee costs $5,475 on average, according to SHRM's 2025 benchmarking report. For an executive it is $35,879.

Those figures cover recruiting spend only. They leave out the hours your team spends interviewing and the work that sits undone while the seat is empty.

U.S. private employers paid an average of $46.89 for every hour worked in June 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. $32.82 of that is wages and $14.07 is benefits, which is 30% of the total.

McKinsey estimates that current AI and related technology could automate work activities that take up 60 to 70% of employee time. On a 40-hour week that is 24 to 28 hours for each person.

Asana's Anatomy of Work index, a survey of 9,615 knowledge workers, found people spend 58% of the workday on work about work. That is the chasing, coordinating and updating that surrounds the job they were hired to do.

A chat window barely touches those hours. In a St. Louis Fed survey, workers who used generative AI saved 5.4% of their time, about 2.2 hours a week. Typing a prompt and pasting the answer somewhere is still you doing the work, one task at a time.

Most articles on this compare a hire with an AI build that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. A small company faces a simpler choice, and it usually comes up at the front desk.

The median receptionist wage is $38,010 a year, or $3,168 a month before payroll taxes and benefits. Xaedros is $499 a month, or $5,988 a year, with setup included. A year of it costs about what recruiting one employee costs before any salary is paid.

At Tidy Up Services, a cleaning company in Jacksonville, the admin that software took over had been 29 hours a week by hand: quotes, booking, cleaner assignment, confirmations, invoicing and payroll.

Take the role most small companies hire first. The numbers below use the national figures already cited, so treat the result as an estimate and swap in your own.

The first year of the seat costs about ten times a year of the software. That gap is the budget you have left for the part of the job a person should do.

It leaves things out on both sides, and you should count them.

On the hire's side, the table has no training time, no cover for sick days and no cost for starting over if the person leaves.

On the software's side, somebody still has to own the exceptions. A customer who wants something unusual, a disputed invoice or a complaint needs a person, and that person needs to be reachable. Software that handles the routine well makes this easier, because the exceptions are all that reach you.

Some work needs a person. Judgment calls with real stakes, relationships and anything physical belong to people, and so does the phone if your customers call. Xaedros does not answer phone calls.

So the useful question before you post the job is what the role would do all week. Write the tasks down. Mark each one that ends in a message, a booking, a record or an invoice. Software can hold those. Hire for what remains, and you will often find the role is part-time, or a better job than the one you were about to fill.

Next: how much of a receptionist's job AI already does and what AI automation costs once you count the builder.