It is a quarter to midnight and the managing director is still prompting. Twelfth attempt, and the script finally does what it was supposed to do. A genuine moment of satisfaction.
The quarterly plan he was going to start on this morning is still empty. So is the performance review that has been pushed back three weeks running. But the script works.
We run into this more and more with clients. Not with everyone, and certainly not with the majority. But among the people who have properly gone down this road it runs deep, and that group is almost always made up of exactly the people with the highest hourly cost in the building.
Why it feels so good
Let us be honest about why this happens, because “lack of discipline” is not the reason.
Leadership is a job where you rarely get to see whether something worked. You hire somebody and six months later you find out whether it was a good call. You change a process and the effects show up next quarter, if you can attribute them at all. You have a difficult conversation and whether it helped becomes clear months afterwards.
Prompting is the opposite. You type something, you get an answer within ten seconds, you see immediately whether it is better or worse. It gives you the feedback loop the rest of your job withholds. That is not a weakness, that is how people are built.
On top of that, it genuinely pays off. A director who has spent a few weeks working seriously with these tools understands what they can and cannot do far better than someone who has only read about them. That understanding is valuable and you should not outsource it.
The problem starts afterwards.
The arithmetic
A senior CTO in the Netherlands earns between €14,000 and €18,000 gross per month this year. Add holiday pay and employer contributions and you land around €260,000 a year. Divide that by a realistic number of productive hours, roughly 1,800, and you get about €140 per hour. As a cross-check: an interim CTO here bills between €175 and €350 an hour.
Suppose 20 hours a week go into prompting. Across 45 workable weeks that is 900 hours a year.
- 900 hours at €140 comes to €126,000 a year.
- The same 900 hours, done by someone at $25 an hour, costs a little over €20,000.
- At 30 hours a week the gap widens to roughly €150,000 a year.
That is not an accounting trick. That is the salary of two full-time employees, spent on work somebody else could do just as well.
The number nobody enjoys reading
In February this year the US National Bureau of Economic Research surveyed nearly 6,000 executives across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia. Sixty-nine percent of those companies now use AI in some form. Then came the question of whether it was delivering anything.
Eighty-nine percent saw no change at all in productivity, measured as revenue per employee.
There are several explanations for that, and not all of them flatter the technology. But one of them rarely gets mentioned: when your expensive people do the work themselves, the gain gets eaten by whoever is producing it. You save three hours on a task and pay for it with five hours of executive time. On paper you have become more efficient. On the invoice you have not.
What you should not hand over
To be clear, because this is exactly where advice like this usually goes wrong.
You do not hand over your judgement. Which problems are worth solving, what is good enough to put in front of a customer, where the company carries risk: that is your job and it stays your job. The first few weeks of learning what these tools can and cannot do are time well spent too.
What you do hand over is the execution. Rephrasing it for the twelfth time. Working out why the output is not quite right. Cleaning up, testing and actually shipping what comes out. That is real work, but it is not board-level work.
Hand it to whom
To someone who does this all day and has got good at it. We call them AI-Sitters: developers who direct, review and refine AI-generated work with the discipline production software demands. You say what needs to happen and judge what comes back. They do the twelve iterations.
The cost difference is large, but it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what you get back.
Nine hundred hours
That is what frees up at 20 hours a week. More than half a full-time role, from the most expensive and best-informed person in the company.
Those are the customer conversations that never happen. The employee who has been waiting half a year for a serious talk about where they are going. The strategic decision that keeps sliding because there are never two uninterrupted hours for it. The partnership everybody talks about and nobody moves on.
None of that goes faster with a better prompt. It only goes faster when you have time for it.
An honest look
If you were thinking about your own week while reading this, go and count the hours from the past month. Do not estimate. Look back through your calendar and your history.
If it turns out fine, nothing is wrong and you now have a number to keep an eye on. If it does not, you know exactly what it cost you this year.
In forty-five minutes we will look with you at what is actually inside those hours, and what is sensibly worth handing over. Book a 45-minute call or email contact@3bird.nl.
