Originally published on techzimo.com
Technology is continually advancing, and businesses have to keep up with those advancements in order to stay on top of things. One of the advances that companies are becoming more and more familiar with is artificial intelligence or AI. Unfortunately, while AI can certainly be helpful, it can also be rather costly.
In this article, you will find tips on understanding how expensive it is to incorporate artificial intelligence solutions for your business.
The Benefits of Artificial Intelligence
Before you spend the money, you should understand the potential benefits of using artificial intelligence for your business. It’s a good idea to weigh the costs versus the benefits to determine what will or won’t work for you and maybe even save yourself a few dollars.
AI for businesses is a fairly broad category and can encompass a lot of different aspects. You might not need all of the things available. AI solutions might include some of the following items:
- Chatbots
- Personal sales experiences
- Marketing
- Analysis and reporting
- Research and development
- Virtual assistants
Consider if a chatbot could help take some responsibility off your shoulders or make customer service and support more available to your customers. Might it be worth it?
Factors that Determine AI Costs
When it comes down to it, the factors that will determine your AI costs will be what you need for your business and how you implement it. If you use a third-party AI solution, your costs could range from hundreds of dollars to $40,000 per year. Of course, this is a pretty big range, but it mostly depends on what you need and how many pieces of AI you use for your business.
On another note, custom AI solutions might cost anywhere from $6,000 to $300,000 on average, depending on what is part of the custom solution. There are some free chatbot options out there that you can use if incorporating AI doesn’t seem to be in your budget right now.
It’s much more affordable to use third-party solutions, especially if you don’t have a lot of money to allocate. What affects the cost the most is the type of AI that you need to use.
Chatbots are very helpful with customer support and work to streamline the process somewhat. It might help answer questions before a human has to be called into service. Some chatbots can even be used on social media and your website, and these are perhaps one of the more affordable options.
Analysis services can help with anything from marketing to SEO and sorting through data to help improve business processes. These costs vary depending on your needs. Virtual assistants are also a popular AI solution, but these tend to be quite a bit more expensive. Think of Siri or Alexa – these are virtual assistants but expect to pay a pretty penny for those services.
AI can be affordable if you do your research and start with the basics. If you have the budget room for building AI services, start looking into your options and determine just what will work for you.