AI developers are licensing internal records from established companies to train their models. Process manuals, help desk history, CRM notes, project archives, QA logs and team chat all qualify. It is a license, so you keep your data and keep using it. Interested in selling? See if your business fits the program in under a minute.
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Find out how much your company pays people to look for things.
Hunting for the latest version of a file, scrolling through old email threads, asking in chat who knows the answer: none of it feels like a big deal on its own. Across a whole team and a whole year, it is a serious line item. This calculator turns those lost minutes into hours and dollars. Enter how many knowledge workers you have, their average salary, an overhead percentage for benefits and the hours each person spends searching per week. You get the hours lost per year, the full yearly cost and how many full time employees that time adds up to. A comparison table shows the same cost at well known research figures, and a savings field shows what better documentation could recover.
| Source of estimate | Hours per week | Hours per year | Yearly cost |
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Search time does not include the colleague who stopped to answer a question, the work redone because the original could not be found, or the focus lost after each interruption. The real cost is often higher than the figure shown.
A shared folder structure, a naming rule and a one page index of where things live can cost almost nothing to set up. Even a 20 percent reduction in search time often pays for a full knowledge base project within months.
Once your documents are organized and searchable, they can power internal AI tools and become an asset in their own right. AI developers license organized business records from established companies to train their models.
McKinsey research puts it at about 1.8 hours a day, or 9.3 hours a week, for knowledge workers. IDC found about 2.5 hours a day. Lower estimates start around 2.5 hours a week, so the calculator lets you choose your own figure.
Hourly cost is salary plus overhead divided by 2,080 working hours. That is multiplied by the hours spent searching each week, the number of working weeks and the number of employees.
It converts the total hours lost into the number of full time people they represent. If your team loses 4,000 hours a year to searching, that is roughly two full time employees doing nothing but looking for information.
A single trusted knowledge base, written SOPs, consistent file naming, archiving old versions and a good internal search or AI assistant. Most companies see the biggest gains from the first three.
Run a short anonymous survey asking how long people spend looking for information each day, or have a few volunteers log it for a week. Use the average in this calculator.