Most founders I know couldn’t tell you what a human executive assistant costs. The answer is roughly $50,000–$80,000 per year, fully loaded — before PTO, benefits, or the six weeks it takes to train someone.
So they don’t hire one. They do it themselves.
The invisible tax
Research consistently shows that founders and executives spend 30–40% of their working week on administrative tasks: email management, scheduling, research, document prep, follow-ups. For a 50-hour week, that’s 15–20 hours.
If your time is worth $100/hour — a conservative number for anyone running a business — that’s $1,500–$2,000 per week. $78,000–$104,000 per year of capacity consumed by tasks that don’t require you.
You could hire a part-time assistant and reclaim most of that. But then you have a person to manage, onboard, and retain. And they work 9–5. And they take vacation. And when they leave, you start over.
The alternative
Cahori costs $19/month. It works 24/7. It doesn’t need onboarding, PTO, or HR. It doesn’t forget things or have off days. It learns your preferences over time and gets faster at doing your work the way you want it done.
The ROI math is almost embarrassingly simple. One hour of recovered capacity per week pays for a year of Cahori.
The question isn’t whether you can afford an AI assistant. It’s whether you can afford not to have one.