Comparison
AI IT support vs hiring internal IT staff
Somewhere around 15–30 staff, most UK businesses start asking whether to hire their first IT person. The instinct is reasonable: someone in the building, who knows the business, who can just sort it. The comparison is rarely run properly, because the salary is compared against a service fee rather than against the fully loaded cost of employment and the coverage a single person can actually provide.
The short answer
Hire an internal IT person when IT work is continuous, physical or specific to your business — bespoke systems, hardware estates, compliance evidence, project delivery. Use AI support when the work is intermittent, repetitive and cloud-based. A single IT hire gives you roughly 1,700 working hours a year across one timezone, no holiday cover and one person's knowledge; AI support gives continuous cover for a narrow band of problems and no institutional knowledge at all. Many businesses do best with both later on: AI absorbing first-line volume so the person you hire spends their time on systems and projects rather than password resets.
Side by side
| AI IT support | Internal IT employee | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual cost (UK, 20 users) | ~£960 at £4 per user per month | £38,000–£55,000 salary plus ~20% employment cost |
| Hours of cover | 24/7/365 | ~37.5 hours a week, minus holiday and sickness |
| Holiday and sickness cover | Not applicable | You have none unless you hire a second person |
| Breadth of knowledge | Wide but shallow; strong on documented Microsoft 365 behaviour | Whatever that individual happens to know |
| Business context | None beyond what is in the conversation | Deep, and improves every month |
| Physical tasks | None | Yes — desk setups, hardware swaps, cabling |
| Project delivery | Not offered | Yes |
| Knowledge retention when they leave | Not applicable | Significant risk; often undocumented |
| Ramp-up time | Minutes | 1–3 months |
| Scales with headcount | Linearly and automatically | In steps — the next hire is another full salary |
Choose AI IT support if
- IT problems are frequent but small, and mostly Microsoft 365 or account-related
- You cannot justify a full salary, and the alternative today is a director doing IT at 9pm
- You need cover outside office hours or across timezones
- Your systems are standard rather than bespoke
Choose Internal IT employee if
- You have bespoke or line-of-business systems nobody outside the company understands
- There is a genuine hardware estate to manage, procure and physically maintain
- You need IT projects delivered, not just incidents cleared
- Compliance or client contracts require a named internal owner for IT
- IT is close enough to your product that the knowledge should live in-house
What it costs
The fully loaded cost of a UK IT employee is not the salary. On a £45,000 salary, add roughly 13.8% employer National Insurance above the threshold, 3% minimum pension, equipment, software licences, recruitment fees and management time — realistically £55,000–£60,000. Against that, the honest question is not 'can we afford it' but 'is there £55,000 of IT work here'. For a 20-person all-cloud business, there usually is not — there is perhaps a day a week of real work and four days of availability you are paying for. The counter-argument is that availability has value, and that a good hire quietly prevents problems that never become tickets. That value is real and hard to measure.
Where we're the wrong choice
AI support cannot do the most valuable thing an internal IT person does: notice. An employee sees that the sales team has been quietly using a personal Dropbox for six months, that the finance laptop is four Windows versions behind, that the new starter process is broken. Nobody raises a ticket for any of that. AI support only ever sees what someone thinks to ask about, so it is structurally blind to drift, shadow IT and slow decay. If your risk is neglect rather than response time, hire the person.
Frequently asked questions
AI IT support vs Internal IT employee — common questions
At what headcount should a UK business hire internal IT?
There is no reliable headcount trigger — the trigger is workload type. Businesses of 80 people running entirely on Microsoft 365 often need no internal IT; businesses of 25 with a workshop, a server and bespoke software often need someone at 25. Count the hours of genuinely physical or bespoke work per week. Below a day, a hire is hard to justify.
Can AI support work alongside an existing IT person?
That is the arrangement that usually works best. The AI takes the interrupt-driven first-line traffic that destroys focused work, and the internal person gets their week back for projects, documentation and improvements. It also gives you cover while they are on holiday.
Does AI support reduce the need for a second IT hire?
More often than it removes the first. The first hire is usually justified by physical and bespoke work that AI cannot do. The second hire is usually justified by ticket volume — and that is precisely the load AI absorbs.
What about an IT apprentice instead?
An apprentice is cheaper than a senior hire and builds institutional knowledge, but needs supervision that a small business often cannot provide, and a supervised apprentice is slower than either alternative for the first year. If nobody in the business can mentor them, an apprentice is the wrong answer regardless of cost.
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