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In business, everything revolves around efficiency and time. Every minute is valuable, and that value is often expressed in monetary terms. There’s a well-known rule of thumb that says, “1 euro per minute.” It’s a simple way to understand how much time and money something costs. If you spend an hour on a task, it costs you or your company at least 60 euros, assuming the total cost of an average employee (let’s call him “Joe Average”) is about 60 euros per hour.
But did you know that the real profit often lies in the small tasks that take just a few minutes each time? These tasks may seem minor, but they accumulate over time, eventually consuming a significant amount of time and money.
A great example of this is creating an excerpt for blog posts or news articles.
Example : WordPress Excerpts
Let’s dive into a real-world example. Suppose you run a blog or manage a news website with hundreds or even thousands of articles. For each post, you’d like to add an excerpt—a short summary that gives readers a quick idea of what the article is about without having to read the entire piece. This is the tiny text Google uses for their search results.
Creating an excerpt typically takes about 2 to 5 minutes per post. You read the post, summarize it in your head into two sentences, think of a keyword or tag to go along with it, and save it. Then you open the next post and repeat the process.
For a single post, this may not seem like much work. But imagine (like me) you have a website with 1,500 posts that don’t yet have neat excerpts. That would take 1,500 times 2 to 5 minutes, which totals at least 3,000 minutes or 50 hours of work.
If you outsourced that task to an employee or freelancer, it could easily cost around 3,000 euros, based on the aforementioned rate of 60 euros per hour.
An LLM Can Do It
But what if there was a way to do this process much faster and at a fraction of the cost? This is where the power of an LLM (Language Learning Model) comes into play. An LLM, like the ones developed by OpenAI, can analyze text and summarize it in a way that’s similar to how a human would.
The difference? An LLM doesn’t take minutes; it takes just a few seconds. A well-trained model can generate an excerpt in just 3 to 5 seconds per post.
Let’s revisit our example of 1,500 posts. Where a human would need 50 hours to create all those excerpts, an LLM can do it in roughly 2 hours. This is still a conservative estimate, factoring in potential rate limits (restrictions on how many requests you can make to an LLM service per minute or hour).
The time savings are impressive, but the cost savings are even more so.
The Costs: From 3,000 Euros to 2.50 Euros, 99.9% savings
The beauty of using LLMs like those from OpenAI is that the costs for using them are far lower than what you would pay for human labor. For example, OpenAI charges about 2.50 euros per 1 million tokens. A “token” is a chunk of text, and in practice, this amounts to approximately 4 characters (letters, numbers, spaces, etc.). For the 1,500 posts in our example, let’s assume that you need about 600 tokens per post (small articles, half a page of text) for the LLM to analyze the text and generate an excerpt. That means you would use a total of approximately 900,000 tokens for all those posts combined. That’s just under 1 million tokens.
The cost for the LLM to process those 1,500 posts and generate the excerpts? Just $ 2.50. Compare that to the 3,000 euros you would pay a human to do the same work. That’s a cost saving of 99.99%, for a task that delivers an acceptable or even good result.
What Does This Mean for Businesses?
For businesses, especially those dealing with large amounts of text, language, publishing, writing, reporting, the implications are huge. A translation takes 10 seconds, for 0.1 cent. Whether you manage a news site, a blog, a content management system, or a database of product descriptions, these small repetitive ‘standard’ tasks can consume a lot of time and money over time. And it’s often in these small, repetitive tasks where real profit lies.
If you run a news site with 20 posts per day, just AI automating the excerpts would save you 40 minutes a day, 40 dollars a day, 14.400 dollars per year.
By using an LLM, you can not only save time but also drastically reduce your costs. The initial investment to set up such a system is minimal compared to the long-term savings.
It took me 6 hours of coding (with my mini-scrum method) to set up the system, and it immediately saves me 50 hours of work.
Moreover, the time you save can be redirected towards other, more valuable tasks. Where you add more knowledge, expertise, social skills, human skills. For instance, you could focus on improving the quality of your content, expanding your services, or enhancing the user experience on your website.
The Future of Work
What this example demonstrates is that technology enables us to work smarter, not harder. In the past, we might have thought that tasks like creating excerpts could only be done by humans because they involve some form of creative and intellectual work. But now we see that artificial intelligence, such as an LLM, can perform these tasks just as well, if not better, in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
This doesn’t mean people are becoming obsolete. On the contrary, by using technology to automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks, people can focus on what really matters. Think about strategy, creativity, innovation, and solving complex problems, making ‘big descisions’, inspiring your colleagues—these are the areas where humans are still indispensable and where we can truly make a difference.
Conclusion
In business, it’s all about efficiency and cost savings, and Average Joe costs 1 dollar per minute in business. Often the biggest opportunities lie in the smallest manual tasks. Creating excerpts for 1,500 blog posts might seem like a simple task, but the time and costs involved can quickly add up. Thanks to the rise of Language Learning Models like those from OpenAI, we can now automate these tasks, with enormous savings as a result.
What would normally cost 3,000 euros and take 50 hours of work can now be done for just 2.50 euros and 2 hours. This is a perfect example of how new technology enables businesses to work smarter and faster and boost profitability at the same time.
The future of work lies in the intelligent combination of human creativity and technological efficiency. AI assisted. And the real profit? That often lies in the small things.
