What AI Implementation Actually Costs a Small BC Firm
6 minute read
Most AI pricing conversations are useless because they skip the only question that matters: what is the manual work costing you now? Here is how to run that math honestly, and what implementation actually costs when someone builds a system around your operation.
Start with the cost of the status quo.
Take one process. Say your office spends two hours a day re-keying orders, chasing documents, or assembling reports. At a loaded wage of $30 an hour, that is roughly $15,000 a year, and that is the visible cost. The invisible cost is the follow-ups that never happen, the leads that cool off, and the owner's evenings.
If the manual work you want gone is worth less than a few thousand dollars a year, automation is probably not worth buying. If it is a meaningful fraction of a salary, the math starts working fast.
What drives implementation cost.
Three things: how messy the current process is, how many systems the work has to touch, and how much of the work needs human judgment kept in the loop. A quoting follow-up system that lives in one inbox costs less than a document pipeline spanning a CRM, an accounting package, and a compliance file.
The messiness is the honest driver. A process nobody has ever written down has to be mapped and fixed before it can be automated, and that operations work is usually two-thirds of the engagement. Vendors who skip it are the reason so many automation projects quietly die.
The ranges, honestly.
Small, contained systems, one process and one or two tools, tend to land in the low thousands to build, sometimes with a modest monthly cost to run and manage. Systems that replace a meaningful share of a full-time role run higher, and the right comparison is against the salary line, not against software subscriptions.
Our own engagements start around the cost of a single month of one employee's wages. Whatever number you are quoted by anyone, ask what happens if the result does not show up. We answer that with a guarantee: the system replaces the work of one full-time employee within 90 days, or we keep working for free until it does.
Questions that expose a bad quote.
Ask what happens before any automation gets built. If the answer is not some version of mapping and fixing your process, the quote is for automating your current mess. Ask who owns the system afterward; the answer should be you. Ask what the monthly cost covers, and what breaks if you stop paying it.
A serious implementer will also tell you when the answer is no. Some processes are not worth automating, and hearing that on a first call is a good sign, not a bad one.