Napkin math

What one unreliable conference room costs

I gave four AIs the same conservative profile of one meeting room and asked what that room wastes in a year. Every answer came back five figures. The assumptions, the results, and the prompt are all below so you can run your own numbers.

The test

Same inputs, four AIs

The profile I gave each one. Nothing exotic, and deliberately on the low side:

What each one said a year in that room costs:

The spread is the honest part. Each AI made its own assumptions about failure rates and how much a bad meeting matters, so the exact number moved around. None of them treated it as a small problem.

Check it yourself

The math you can do on a whiteboard

You don't need an AI for the biggest piece. Multiply the people in the room by their loaded hourly cost, the minutes lost getting started, and the meetings per week:

6 people × $75/hr × 5 min × 12 meetings/week = ≈ $450 a week

Over 50 working weeks that's about $22,500 a year in slow starts alone. More than the most conservative AI answer, and it counts nothing for rescheduled meetings, decisions that sat waiting, or a glitch during a customer pitch.

These are estimates built from assumptions, not measurements. Think of the result as capacity at risk rather than cash out the door, and change any input that doesn't match your rooms.

Run your own numbers

The prompt

Paste this into whichever AI you use. It shows your numbers back to you in a table first, so you can correct them in one reply or just say "run it."

I want to understand what unreliable meeting-room technology actually costs my company per year.

Start by showing my numbers below in a single table so I can correct any of them in one reply. If I say "run it," use them as-is. Then do the full calculation in one pass.

My starting numbers (rough):
- People in a typical meeting: 6
- Average loaded hourly cost per person: $75
- Minutes lost getting a typical meeting started (connections, audio, screen): 5
- Meetings per week in our main room: 12
- Meetings per month abandoned or rescheduled because of tech: 2
- Customer- or prospect-facing meetings per month (0 if outside meetings are rare): 8
- Rough value of a deal or relationship at the table, if any: $50,000

Calculate, showing your work:
1. Annual cost of the routine slow starts.
2. Annual cost of reschedules, including the coordination time to re-book.
3. Annual deal value put at risk by visible tech failures in front of customers. Use a small, defensible failure rate and impact percentage, and state your assumptions. If customer-facing meetings are zero or rare, keep this at $0 instead of inventing risk.
4. Anything I'm not counting - for example, rooms people avoid because they don't trust them, or travel that video should have replaced.

Finish with a one-page summary table for a single room, then multiplied across all rooms with the same setup. Keep every assumption conservative and visible - I'd rather have a number I can defend than a big one.

Copy the prompt