Six to nine hours per week time saved on document work, new GovGPT one-pager substantiates it with figures

What does AI really deliver for a civil servant who spends the whole day drafting documents, rewriting texts, composing letters, and summarising and comparing documents? Municipalities preparing a council proposal are asking us this question more and more often. CivAI has summarised the answer on a single A4 page. For a full-time employee working 36 hours a week, a net time saving of 6 to 9 hours per week is realistic, supported by international research and the hourly rates of the Dutch central government. The one-pager is available for free download.

Download the one-pager Time Savings in Document Work (pdf, 1 page)

Where the time goes

The one-pager takes a standard 36-hour working week as its starting point: seven hours drafting first versions, five hours rewriting and shortening, four hours summarising, five hours analysing and comparing, four hours on emails and letters, and eleven hours on meetings and administration. AI saves 20 to 60 percent of the time on writing and analysis tasks, and virtually nothing on meetings and administration. In gross terms, this amounts to 7 to 10 hours per week. After deducting time for fact-checking, verifying sources, legal phrasing, and administrative tone, 6 to 9 net hours remain.

It becomes concrete per task. Rewriting a letter into clear B1 language takes 45 to 60 minutes without AI and, including checks, 20 to 35 minutes with AI. Summarising a thirty-page report drops from one and a half to two hours to 35 to 60 minutes. Structuring a draft council proposal saves about an hour.

Three scenarios

The one-pager works with three scenarios. Cautious, with occasional use and a lot of manual checking, 3 to 5 hours per week. Realistic, with a fixed working method, good prompts and regular use, 6 to 9 hours per week, or 275 to 415 hours per year. Optimal, with a secure municipal AI environment, templates, standardised processes, and training, 9 to 12 hours per week.

What the research says

The figures have been benchmarked against external research. The British government’s experiment with 20,000 civil servants across twelve departments resulted in an average of 26 minutes saved per day, more than thirteen working days per year, with the greatest gains in document drafting. In 2023, Science published an experiment in which professionals completed writing tasks 40 percent faster with 18 percent higher quality. Harvard Business School and BCG found a 25 percent time saving and 40 percent higher quality among 758 consultants, as long as the task was within AI’s capabilities.

A Danish study is also deliberately included. Among 25,000 employees using standalone chatbots, the time saving was only 2.8 percent. Without a working method, templates, and training, AI delivers little. That is precisely the argument for a well-organised environment with agents per team, rather than a standalone chatbot subscription.

Costs and benefits

To value the freed-up time, the one-pager uses the Government Tariff Guidelines 2026 from the Ministry of the Interior. The wage costs of an employee in grade 9 are 58 euros per productive hour, excluding overheads. In the realistic scenario, the time saving per employee is therefore worth 16,000 to 24,000 euros per year, compared to a guideline price of around 35 euros per employee per month for the GovGPT licence. That licence is paid back after about seven hours of time saved per year, about ten minutes per week.

For an organisation where fifty employees use GovGPT structurally, this amounts to 8 to 12 FTE in time. The one-pager deliberately refers to this as freed-up time, not cash savings. The benefit only becomes visible when the organisation uses that time for residents, cases, and backlogs.

The employee remains in control

The time saving only arises with safe and structured use. This means working in a municipally approved AI environment with data under own management, no personal data in consumer tools, and GDPR, information security, archiving, and FOI requirements fully in force. The employee always checks facts, sources, legal basis, and administrative tone themselves. GovGPT does not make decisions about residents, asks follow-up questions, and highlights uncertainty.

The one-pager concludes with a simple measurement method. For four weeks, track per task how much time it normally takes, how much with AI, and how much extra checking time is required. Net time saving is normal time minus AI time minus checking time. This way, a municipality gets its own figures for the council proposal, instead of just ours.

Get started yourself

Download the one-pager (pdf) and use it in the management team or the council proposal. More about GovGPT, the sovereign AI alternative for government with EU hosting and data that remains with the organisation, can be found at govgpt.nl. Would you like to benchmark the figures against your own organisation? Email Pascal Mariany at pascal@civai.eu.

Sources. Government Digital Service, Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiment, cross-government findings report (2025). Noy and Zhang, Science (2023). Dell’Acqua et al., Harvard Business School and BCG (2023). Humlum and Vestergaard, Denmark (2025). Ministry of the Interior, Government Tariff Guidelines 2026. The hours per task are indicative.

Illustrative image, created with AI