Compare

Four ways to do
the same work

Hire a person, give the team ChatGPT, build it yourself, or use Surehand on Gatehouse.

ALL FOUR ARE SOMETIMES THE RIGHT ANSWER.

/01Hire a person

A hire, or overtime on the team you have.

/02Give the team ChatGPT

A chat window, and someone pasting into it.

/03Build it yourself

Your own engineers, AI models and on-call rota.

/04Surehand

We build and run governed agents for you on Gatehouse, our control plane.

/01

The four options, side by side

Each row compares one thing buyers check.

Four ways to do the same work, compared row by row: hire a person, give the team ChatGPT, build it yourself, and Surehand.
	Hire a person	Give the team ChatGPT	Build it yourself	Surehand (us)
Time to first result	A hiring round, plus notice	Same day	Months	Set in the teardown
How cost grows	Salary, fixed and rising	Flat, per seat	Large up front, then upkeep	Agreed in the teardown
Copes with more work	No. You hire again	Only as fast as people type	Yes, while maintained	Yes
Runs unattended	No	No. A person has to paste	Yes	Yes
Handles odd cases	Yes. That is the job	Yes, if asked well	As far as you coded for	Yes, or it holds
A record you can hand an auditor	Notes, if any were kept	No record you can hand over	Logs, which seldom count as evidence	A sealed record, with evidence and approver
A hard limit on spending	Policy and judgement	None	Only if you built one	Checked before each action runs
When it is not sure	They ask someone	It answers anyway	Only if you built a hold	It holds for one named approver
Who is accountable	The person	Nobody, in practice	The team that built it	Named in the record
If it ends	What they knew leaves with them	Nothing to keep	You keep it all, and the upkeep	Export in open formats, reads without Gatehouse
Where it breaks first	Volume, and holidays	Consistent answers, and proof	Upkeep, once the build is done	A process nobody wrote down

The last row shows where each option breaks first.

/02

How the cost grows

We cannot give you a number without knowing your volume. We can show how each cost grows. A hire adds cost one whole person at a time, and that cost stays the same in a quiet month.

Which option costs less depends on how many cases need a person. The teardown measures that, along with your volume. For more, read How much does an AI agent cost?

/03

Pick something else if

For a lot of work, one of these three is the better choice. Here is when to pick each one.

Hire a person if

The value is that a human is on the other end, as with key accounts, negotiations and delicate talks. An agent would lose that. Hire too if the work fits inside one person's day and is not growing.

Give the team ChatGPT if

You want help with drafts, summaries and ideas, and a person reads each result before it is sent. That works well, costs little and is ready today. It stops being enough when work must run with nobody at the keyboard. It also falls short when you must later prove what happened and why.

Build it yourself if

Build it if the decisions you want to automate are your product. You should already run live software with engineers on call, and at least two people should own it. Then build it with the controls set out in What is AI governance? None of it is secret, and we want you to do it well.

/04

Pick us if

Surehand fits when all four of these are true.

The work happens whether or not anyone is free, so it cannot wait for a person.
The work is decisions made on evidence, such as reading, matching, checking and replying.
Someone will ask you to prove what happened, and you want to answer from the record.
You do not want to hire, or put engineers on call, to handle it.

If all four are true, an agent can do this work under rules. If any one is false, one of the options above is likely the better choice. Surehand builds and runs the agents, and they run on Gatehouse, the product we make.

See Gatehouse

/05

What we are not for

Work we turn down, so you can rule it out before the teardown.

Work that must finish in a split second

The policy check adds a little time and leaves a record. If the answer must arrive before a web page loads, use something else.

A process nobody has written down

Write the process down before you automate it. Do not let anyone sell you automation for a process that lives only in someone's head.

Anything you cannot undo if it goes wrong once

A hold stops the cases your rules flag, so a mistake nobody wrote a rule for can still get through. Where one mistake cannot be undone, keep a person doing the work.

Very small processes

If the process takes little time today, the teardown may cost you more attention than it saves. Come back when it grows, or when you need to prove what happened.

/06

Questions people ask

Is Surehand a replacement for hiring someone?

Sometimes. It takes over the decisions in a role that repeat, such as matching invoices or drafting the same reply from the same evidence. It does not replace a person whose value is the relationship, the negotiation or a call that needs fresh judgement.

How is this different from giving the team ChatGPT?

A chat window needs a person at the keyboard and leaves no record you could hand an auditor. It also has no limit on what it will say. A governed agent runs on its own inside a signed manifest on Gatehouse. It cannot go past its spend limit. Where judgement is needed, it holds for one named approver. Each run is sealed into a record with the evidence it used. Both tools are useful, for different work.

What happens if we want to leave?

You take the audit trail, policy history and labelled examples in open formats. They read without Gatehouse installed, so you do not need us to open your own records.