What an AI transformation costs: a 12-month budget for mid-size and large companies.

Why per-agent prices mislead at company level

Ask what an AI agent costs and you get a price per agent: a build fee and a monthly running cost. That is the right question for one workflow, and our guide how much does an AI agent cost answers it in detail. It is the wrong question for a company-wide programme, for three reasons:

• Agents share a foundation. The company brain and the environment are paid for once and reused by every later department. Pricing agent by agent counts them several times or not at all.
• The sequence changes the cost. A first department proves the model before the bigger spend. A budget that ignores the order overstates the risk in month one and understates the commitment in month nine.
• Running costs are a programme line. Upkeep, new agents and reviews continue after launch. They belong in year one, not in a footnote.

So we budget an AI transformation in four lines, one per phase.

The four budget lines: map, prove, scale, run

Line	What it pays for	When
Map	Hours per process, assist or take-over decision per task, rules, a phased plan with fixed prices	Weeks 1–2
Prove	One department live with agents, company brain stage 1, test suites	Months 1–3
Scale	Further departments on the same brain and environment	Months 4–9
Run	Monitoring, knowledge upkeep, new agents on a cadence, quarterly reviews	From the first launch, monthly

Every figure below is a published price from our pricing page. None is a programme price; each line is an existing package.

Mid-size example, year one (25 to 250 staff)

A company that starts with one department, builds the company brain alongside it and keeps us on a monthly retainer from month four.

Line	Package	Price
Map	Transformation Assessment, 4 weeks	€3,000
Map (optional)	AI Audit, credited in full toward a project signed within 30 days	€297 (credited)
Prove	Workforce Pro: 5 agents, one department, 60 days	€15,000
Prove	Second Brain: €4,500, €1,500 off when bundled with a Workforce build	€3,000
Run	Scale retainer, €2,500 / month, months 4–12	€22,500
Year one		€43,500

Credited items (the AI Audit here, Scale package scoping below) are not counted in the totals.

Adding a second department in months 7 and 8 with another Workforce Pro build adds €15,000, for a year-one total of €58,500. If you convert to a retainer within 30 days of deployment, part of the project fee is credited toward the first three retainer months; the totals above leave that credit out, so they are an upper figure for this scope.

Starting smaller is possible: a first department can be a Workforce Starter (€7,500, three agents) or an AI Sales Agent (from €4,500 build plus €750 a month) if sales goes first, and the Grow retainer is €1,200 a month.

Large-company example, year one (250+ staff)

A company that needs procurement-grade scoping, several departments under an SLA and its own agent environment.

Line	Package	Price
Map	Scale package scoping, 2 weeks, credited 100% to the project if you proceed within 60 days	€5,000 (credited)
Prove + Scale	Scale package: 8–15+ agents across departments, 90+ days, SLA	from €25,000
Platform	Run package, Second Brain included	€14,500
Run	Embedded retainer, €5,000+ / month, months 5–12	from €40,000
Year one		from about €80,000

The Scale package covers the build and the Run package (€14,500) is the platform line, so a large company starts at about €80,000. Scale package engagements are scoped per company and typically range from €25,000 to €150,000, depending on how many departments are in scope and how much compliance work they need; the scoping produces a fixed, milestone-based price before anything is signed.

Pass-through running costs: models, Cloudflare, licences

Three costs sit outside the packages and are billed to you directly, at cost:

• Model usage. The language models the agents call. On our pricing page we estimate roughly €20 to €500 a month per agent, depending on volume.
• Cloudflare usage. Hosting and platform usage, if OS47 runs in your own Cloudflare account.
• Third-party licences. Any software your setup needs that you do not already have.

Budget them as one line per department and review it monthly. They scale with usage, which is what you want: more work handled, more cost, more hours back.

Where the payback comes from

Payback comes from hours handed back and, in sales, from new revenue. The arithmetic is simple: hours per week the agents absorb, times the fully loaded hourly cost of the people who did that work, times the weeks in the year, compared with the year-one budget above. What decides the result is whether those hours are measured and redeployed, not the model.

• Put your own numbers into the ROI calculator.
• See which functions usually pay back fastest, and why, in AI agent payback by function.

Next steps

Every price above is on our pricing page. To see how the phases fit together for your company, read about our AI transformation services, or start with the €297 AI Audit.

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Key terms in this post: AI agent · AI workforce · AI transformation · AI transformation roadmap