I've been writing about AI time savings for months now. At some point, someone asked me: "How much time are you actually saving each month?"

I didn't know what to say. I had examples and workflows, but no total number. So I measured it.

The result: 50 hours in December 2025 only. That honestly surprised me. Fifty hours is more than a third of a typical monthly work budget. That's huge.

In this edition, I'm sharing a complete breakdown: which tasks I automated, how much time each one saved, what worked, and what didn't.

The free section covers the task-by-task breakdown and the patterns that determine whether a task is AI-ready.

The paid section gives you the tracking methodology (including how to use AI to track AI—because I hate manual data entry), and the amplification framework to scale your savings.

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I wear multiple hats: fractional CFO, AI trainer and consultant, and business owner. This means my task mix is varied - client financial work, teaching and training, and running my own business operations.

Here's what I tracked in December:

CFO/Finance Work:

Entrepreneur Work:

Teaching/Training Work:

I was mindful about what I tracked—only tasks where AI could actually help. My time is also split between client calls, managing external teams, and other work that's not AI-ready yet. (Though I'm seriously considering making an AI clone to sit on all those calls.)

Here’s what I got:

The budget 2026 prep is the clearest example. This is my second budget for the same company. I expected more AI leverage this time, but the biggest time drain - aligning stakeholders, removing contradictions, managing conflicting priorities - doesn't go away with AI.

AI helped with mechanics: extracting action items from call transcripts, drafting follow-up emails, and coordinating timelines. That saved 4 hours. But the core problem is a chaotic process with misaligned stakeholders. AI made it more obvious where the process breaks down, but it can't fix it.

My work is varied, so 50 hours across many different tasks is significant but spread thin. If your work is more repetitive and you automate just one process really well, your time savings would be much higher.

For example, if I were only doing financial models, I could triple my client load without hiring a single person. The 20-hour savings on one model would compound with every additional client. Same model structure, different inputs, same AI-assisted workflow.

Or if I were only doing year-end accruals and tax planning, I could handle six clients in the time it used to take me to handle two.

The business model work was complex but structured. Clear framework, defined outputs, validation checkpoints. That's why it saved 20 hours.

The budget work was less complex but unstructured. Messy inputs, misaligned stakeholders, changing requirements. That's why it only saved 4 hours.

AI amplifies good processes. It doesn't create them.

The webinar prep is a good case study. I've been doing these for two years and always used AI. But comparing my December 2025 workflow to my 2023 workflow, the technology has improved dramatically.

Better models, better context handling, better output quality. Combined with my refined prompts and frameworks, the time savings are now significant even compared to my previous AI-assisted process.

This December tracking experiment was actually very insightful for me. Fifty hours looks like a lot—and it is—but I really want to turn it into 100.

Now the real question: what does 50 hours mean for you?

In the subscriber-only section, I'm sharing the complete framework to find your own 50 hours—or 100, or 200, depending on how repetitive your work is.

You'll get the tracking methodology I used (including how to use AI to track AI, because manual data entry is nobody's friend), the amplification strategy that shows how one perfectly automated task can save you 200+ hours annually, and the task assessment framework to identify your best AI candidates before you waste time on the wrong workflows.

If you're tired of "AI will save you time" promises without the how, this is your playbook.

That's it for this week. The result of this December experiment surprised me a lot. Fifty hours is not something I expected to see when I started.

I'm definitely continuing this. I'll share what I get per quarter and over the full year. And I'd love to hear what you discover when you run your own experiment. Reply to this email or message me on LinkedIn with your results—what worked, what surprised you, what didn't deliver the savings you expected.

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Until next Tuesday, keep balancing!

Anna Tiomina
AI-Powered CFO