How much does AI automation cost for an Australian business?
The honest answer is "it depends", which is useless on its own. So here is what it depends on, and a simple way to work out whether an automation is worth paying for.
What actually drives the cost
Most of the cost of an AI automation is not the AI. It is the work of connecting it properly to your business. The main drivers are:
- How many systems it touches. One inbox and one accounting system is simpler than five tools that do not talk to each other.
- How messy the inputs are. Clean, consistent forms are cheap to automate. Free-text emails and scanned PDFs take more work to handle reliably.
- How many exceptions there are. The 80% of cases that follow the rules are easy. The edge cases are where the effort goes.
- How much it needs to be trusted. Anything touching money, customers or compliance needs more testing and safeguards.
The three ways businesses pay
- Software subscriptions. Off-the-shelf tools charge per user per month. Cheap to start, but you pay forever, and you bend your business to fit the tool.
- Hourly consultants. Flexible, but open-ended. You carry the risk if it takes longer than expected.
- Fixed-quote builds. The scope and price are agreed before work starts, and the system is built in your own accounts. This is how we work: you pay for the project, not the seat, and if it takes us longer, that is our problem.
On top of the build, there are usually small running costs: the AI model usage itself (often a few dollars to tens of dollars a month for a typical small-business workload) and any tools it relies on.
A simple way to work out if it pays for itself
Take any repetitive job and do this sum:
- Hours spent on it per week
- multiplied by the hourly cost of the person doing it (including super and on-costs)
- multiplied by 48 working weeks
For example, if a manager costing the business $55 an hour spends six hours a week keying invoices and chasing payments, that is about $15,800 a year of their time. If an automation takes most of that away, you can judge any quote against that number, before even counting fewer errors and faster payments.
Compared with hiring
The other comparison is hiring someone to do it. A hire comes with recruiting time, salary, super, payroll tax, leave and training, and when they leave, the know-how goes with them. An automation that is documented and built in your own accounts keeps working, and it is usually a fraction of the cost of one hire.
Where to start
Pick the single most annoying repetitive job in your business, do the sum above, and get a fixed quote for automating just that one thing. If the numbers work, it will be obvious. If they do not, a good partner should tell you so.