Your Company Data Could Be Worth $100K to $2M
AI companies are paying established businesses for real internal data: SOPs, knowledge bases, CRM records, project histories, QA processes and team communications. The documentation you already have can become a new revenue stream. If you want to sell, answer three quick questions to see if your company qualifies.
- Open to every industry
- US companies first, then other Western markets
- No new work, you license what already exists
Check if your company qualifies
Good news. Your company meets the requirements for the Enterprise Data Partnership. Apply below to find out what your data is worth.
Apply for the Data Partnership →Time Spent Searching for Information Calculator — Cost of Lost Work Time
Looking for a file, an old email or the right person to ask takes more time than most managers think. Studies suggest office workers spend between 2 and 12 hours a week just searching for information. This calculator shows what that costs your company. Enter your team size, average salary and the hours each person spends searching each week. The tool works out the hours lost per year, the dollar cost and how many full time employees that time adds up to. Then set how much you think better documentation or a knowledge base could cut that time, and see the yearly saving. A table compares results across common research figures so you can test low and high cases. It is built for CEOs, COOs and team leads who want a clear number before investing in SOPs, a wiki or internal search.
Cost at Common Research Figures
| Source of estimate | Hours per week | Hours per year | Yearly cost |
|---|
Frequently Asked Questions
How much time do employees spend searching for information?
A widely quoted McKinsey study found that knowledge workers spend about 1.8 hours a day, or 9.3 hours a week, searching for and gathering information. Other surveys put it anywhere from 2.5 to 12 hours a week. The default in this calculator is 5 hours a week, which is a moderate estimate.
How do I calculate the cost of time spent searching?
Multiply hours spent searching per week by the number of working weeks, the number of employees and the hourly cost of an employee. Hourly cost is yearly salary plus benefits divided by about 2,080 working hours. The calculator does this for you.
Why do employees waste so much time looking for things?
Information is spread across email, chat, shared drives and many apps. Files have unclear names, old versions linger and key answers live only in someone's head. Without a single trusted source, people ask around or recreate work that already exists.
How can a company reduce time spent searching?
Create a central knowledge base, write SOPs for common tasks, use clear file naming rules and keep one current version of each document. An internal search tool or AI assistant built on well organized documents can cut search time sharply.
What is a realistic saving from better documentation?
Companies that organize their knowledge often report cutting search time by 25 to 50 percent. The calculator lets you set your own reduction so you can test a cautious and an ambitious case.
Where the Time Goes
Search time is rarely one long block. It is a few minutes here and there: digging through email threads, opening the wrong version of a file, waiting for a reply on chat. Those small moments add up to hours each week for every person.
The Interruption Cost
When someone cannot find an answer, they ask a colleague. Now two people have stopped working. Research on focus shows it can take over 20 minutes to fully get back into a task after an interruption, so the real cost is higher than the search itself.
Fixes That Work
Keep one central home for SOPs and how-to guides. Use a clear naming rule for files. Archive old versions. Record the answers to repeat questions in a shared FAQ. Each of these is cheap compared to the cost shown above.
Organized Knowledge Is an Asset
A company with well kept documents does more than save time. Its knowledge can feed internal AI tools, speeds up onboarding and can even be licensed to AI companies that pay for real business data.
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