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What commercial AI actually costs a £5–20m business
Cost guide
The model is the cheapest part. Almost everything you pay for is the work of making it survive contact with your business.
Owners of established firms ask a reasonable question and get an unreasonable range of answers. Part of that is genuine variation. Part of it is that the industry prices ambiguity rather than scope.
The three layers of cost
1. Finding out what to build
A structured diagnostic that produces a costed business case. Fixed fee, scoped to the size of the business. This should be small — deliberately so, because its job is to tell you whether the rest is worth doing.
2. Building it
Where the money goes. A single, well-scoped first build — quote assistance, enquiry triage and response, a website that captures what a quote needs — sits in the low tens of thousands for a business this size. The variables that move it are integration count, data condition, and how many exceptions the process has.
3. Running it
Consistently the biggest surprise. Model usage for a small business's commercial workload is usually tens of pounds a month, not thousands. The real running cost is support, monitoring and the occasional change — which is why a retainer is usually cheaper than calling someone in a panic.
What moves the number most
| Factor | Effect |
|---|---|
| Number of systems to integrate | Largest single driver. Two systems is a project; six is a programme. |
| Data condition | Clean records shorten everything. Missing history means building the measurement first. |
| Exception volume | Every "except when…" in a process is a branch someone has to design, build and test. |
| Where the data may live | On-premise or air-gapped deployment costs more up front and is occasionally non-negotiable. |
| Who keeps it running | Managed service, or a documented handover to someone internal. Both are legitimate; decide before you build. |
The question worth asking a supplier
Not "how much" but "what happens when it gets something wrong". The answer tells you whether you are buying a demo or a system. If there is no evaluation set, no logging, no human in the loop and no rollback, the price you were quoted was for the demo.
A reasonable first year
For a firm in this bracket: a fixed-fee diagnostic, one build that addresses the largest leak, and a modest monthly figure to run and extend it. If the business case in the diagnostic does not clear that in recovered revenue several times over, the honest recommendation is to do nothing yet.
We quote fixed scope before starting, and the first engagement exists precisely to establish whether the rest pays for itself.