Enterprise AI Cost Intelligence

Before You Sign the AI Budget,
Know the Real Number

Vendor ROI models quote token costs — roughly 20% of the picture. This calculator builds the complete AI vs. employee TCO your CFO will ask for.

Run My TCO Analysis → View the Methodology

3–5×

True AI hosting cost vs. vendor quote

Cost dimensions modeled end-to-end

3-yr

NPV & payback period output

The Full Picture

What the Vendor Slide Deck Leaves Out

Six cost categories that rarely appear in vendor ROI models — but always appear on your invoice.

Agentic Loop Multiplier

A single task isn't one API call. Autonomous agents plan, observe, and reflect — creating context loops that multiply token spend by 4–10× per task.

4–10× token bloat

Non-Linear Concurrency Cost

Pay-per-token economics break down above ~50 concurrent users. Provisioned throughput adds $2,000–$6,000/month in fixed overhead before a single prompt is sent.

$2k–$6k/mo fixed

Data Pipeline Tax

Private AI and RAG deployments require continuous ETL compute and vector re-embedding as your data changes. Gartner: adds 15–30% to hosting cost.

+15–30% hosting cost

AI Cybersecurity Posture

Autonomous agents require prompt injection defense, behavioral monitoring, secrets management, and identity access controls absent from standard IT budgets.

$18k–$60k/yr

The Productivity J-Curve

BCG and McKinsey document a 10–20% output dip during the first 2–4 months of AI adoption. You pay for both the AI and the employee while productivity recovers.

10–20% dip, 2–4 months

Silent Scale Failures

AI fails at machine speed. Downstream data corruption from a single hallucination event cascades before detection. We model the rework cost of silent failures.

Cascade risk quantified

Calculator Output

A Report Your Finance Team Can Act On

The output is a board-ready executive summary — not a marketing dashboard. Every number is traceable to a published source.

Employee True Cost (fully-loaded)

Salary + benefits burden + overhead + management tax + recruiting amortization. 12 roles × 11 levels from BLS, Radford, and Glassdoor 2025 data.

AI Full TCO — 7 Cost Dimensions

Tokens, agentic overhead, hosting, data pipeline, security, process failures, and residual human oversight — summed to a single annual figure.

3-Year NPV & Payback Period

Discounted cash flow analysis with configurable discount rate. Payback period in months. Exportable as a PDF executive report.

AI TCO Executive Summary

Employee True Cost / yr $187,400

AI Full TCO / yr $94,200

Annual Savings $93,200

3-Year NPV $241,500

Payback Period 4.2 months

Token Cost Share of TCO 22%

Before You Sign the AI Budget,Know the Real Number

What the Vendor Slide Deck Leaves Out

A Report Your Finance Team Can Act On

Your Board Meeting Is Coming.Run the Numbers First.

Before You Sign the AI Budget,
Know the Real Number

Your Board Meeting Is Coming.
Run the Numbers First.