AI offers immense value, enabling companies to expedite processes, get valuable data, and offer clients a better experience. However, the cost of AI can make businesses hesitate.

The type of AI solution you choose, as well as your business’s must-have features, impact what you pay for. This is why it’s important to understand how AI software costs vary.

Cost-effectiveness

AI-driven solutions help to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve the customer experience. Moreover, it can be used to automate business processes, making them easier for employees to manage and more productive.

In addition, AI-driven software can also be a great way to track the productivity of your team members and find areas for improvement. These benefits can significantly decrease the overall cost of your AI project.

The AI pricing depends on a variety of factors, including the type of data you need, the complexity of the system and the accuracy rate of the machine learning algorithm. This can result in a wide range of prices, from $20K to hundreds of thousands U.S. dollars.

Automation

Artificial intelligence has a high price tag, and it can be difficult to align ROI goals with AI costs and software needed to integrate with business processes. For this reason, a lot of businesses choose to outsource their AI solutions development.

Generally, companies can pay anywhere from $0 to more than $300,000 for AI software. This includes solutions provided by a third-party or a custom platform built by a team of in-house or freelance data scientists.

When building a custom AI solution, project costs usually stem from hardware, data, model training, deployment automation (a.k.a., MLOps), integration, validation, security, and ongoing model optimization. The key to achieving a higher ROI is to understand how to cut these costs.

Scalability

Scalability refers to the ability of a system or technology to handle increased workload without compromising performance. It is a critical factor for businesses that want to scale up to support growth and increase revenue.

Scalable systems can handle growing workloads by adding new hardware, processors or devices. They can also increase the speed at which they process transactions or requests.

Moreover, they can also be expanded by adding new functions or features that improve efficiency and reduce cost.

In a business setting, scalability measures the ability to grow in terms of revenue without affecting the contribution margin (revenue – variable costs). It is particularly important for companies that are in the early stages of growth.

Flexibility

AI-based pricing solutions are a great way to increase sales productivity, improve decision-making, and reduce costs. They allow B2B companies to better understand their customers’ preferences, enabling them to offer personalized products and services that attract, inspire, and retain B2B customers.

To achieve this, it is important to implement AI systems that can scale up or down to handle different loads. This means implementing everything as a service (XaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS).

Another factor that is crucial for AI systems to be flexible is the underlying infrastructure. A modular infrastructure layer will help to accelerate time to value through reuse, but without compromising flexibility.

This will be especially beneficial when it comes to training and inference computing infrastructure, model-building tools, libraries, and integrated development environments. Having a standard set of recommendations for all these will help ensure that organizations can quickly and easily leverage the benefits of AI, while also minimizing the risk of architectural nightmares down the line.