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The price of an AI agent: five lines on the bill, two of them quoted

12 October 2026

A haulage firm with 16 trucks — invented, from our sample reports — is being offered a route planner: 85,000 NOK to set up and 14,900 NOK a month. The owner is worried about the drivers' overtime, and the planner is meant to cut it. All the firm's overtime costs 21,795 NOK a month. Twenty per cent of that is 4,359 NOK. So the offer is to pay 14,900 in order to stop paying 4,359.

We test our audit agent on invented companies like this one, and the prices in the report are this firm's terms, not the market's. But the offer is built the way real ones are: it contains two sums. The bill has five lines, and the total is set not against "expensive" or "cheap" but against the payment that will disappear once you have bought.

Line 1. Set-up: you pay before you know whether it will work

85,000 NOK for the haulier. 2,400 EUR for a recruitment agency, 150,000 KZT for a training centre — both also invented. Set-up is paid on day one, and if you pull out two months later that money has already been spent.

So settle two things before you pay: what exactly will be done for the money, and whether the agent can connect to your system. The training centre's enquiry-tracking system releases only a list of enquiries, with no history. An agent that needs the history will not run on it, whatever the set-up costs.

Line 2. The monthly fee: multiply it by the contract term

70,000 KZT a month for an AI receptionist at the training centre sounds manageable. But the contract runs for 12 months, and with set-up the first year comes to 990,000 KZT.

Now look at what that buys. The centre's receptionists fall behind during the four weeks of enrolment: each of those weeks brings 165 enquiries instead of the usual 71. In the other weeks, 3.5% of enquiries are left as new. A temporary assistant for enrolment, according to the same report, costs 240,000 KZT for six weeks.

990,000 KZT for a year and 240,000 KZT for six weeks: two prices for one and the same problem.

The temporary assistant is a cost too, and the report calls it one. But a monthly fee should only ever be read together with the term: how many months you are obliged to pay for if you stop after the first. It can go the other way: for the haulier, the report names a reporting module in the driver app at 690 NOK a month, with no minimum term.

Line 3. The model's work: the offer does not mention it

An agent runs on a language model, and the model is billed by volume: how much text it has read and written. Vendors count that volume in tokens — units of text, roughly parts of words.

The vendors' offers in our reports name two sums: set-up and a monthly fee. Whether the fee covers the model's work, they do not say. There are two possibilities. If it is included, ask how many enquiries a month are covered and what happens beyond that. If it is not, ask for an estimate at your volume and for a ceiling beyond which the agent stops and asks a person.

We keep this line separate ourselves: every one of our reports says that language-model costs are billed separately, on actual use. So the question about a ceiling is worth putting to us as well.

And ask for the estimate on two months, a quiet one and a busy one. At the training centre an enrolment week brings 2.3 times as many enquiries as a normal one.

Line 4. Your people's time: no offer includes it

The recruitment agency is being offered an agent to screen CVs. On the vendor's own figure, which nobody has measured, the agent would free 20.3 hours a month for the resourcer. It would also add 24 hours a month of checking what it had done.

Not fewer hours, then, but more. Nobody sees this before launch, because the vendor does the counting and the vendor counts only the work taken away.

More hours go before day one: somebody collects the rules and texts, grants access, checks the first answers and deals with whatever the agent has passed to a person. Nobody's salary changes as a result. What changes is what that person does not get done in those hours.

Line 5. Changes: the agent was bought for today's work

The training centre's AI receptionist works only in WhatsApp. That is where 32% of enquiries come from; the rest come from the website, advertising and Instagram. Connecting a second channel is a change.

A firm's work changes: a new price list, a different rota, a switch of software. Ask three things before you buy. Which changes are included in the fee. How the rest are priced. And who will notice that the agent is quoting the old price list: you, or the customer.

The total is set against the payment that will disappear

Add up the five lines for the first year. Then find, among your costs, the payment the agent will remove or reduce: overtime, a contractor, a subscription, a post you were about to create. Hours saved for someone on a salary do not go here: the salary stays.

At the recruitment agency the agent costs 650 EUR a month and 2,400 EUR to set up. Reading applications is about a third of the resourcer's paid time, and the post stays full-time. The agent stops no payment the firm makes today. Its price is set against zero.

The haulier does have something to set it against: overtime, 21,795 NOK a month. Just to cover the fee of 14,900 NOK, the planner would have to remove more than two thirds of all overtime. If it removed the lot, 6,895 NOK a month would be left after the fee, and the set-up would take more than a year to earn back.

It will not remove the lot. 75% of overtime hours fall on days when the truck had a stop at one of two sites with a queue, and a route does not shorten a queue.

A low price does not cancel the calculation. In the catalogue of Bitrix24 partners in Kazakhstan, which we went through in October 2026, the cheapest bots start at 5,000 KZT a month. If a bot like that removes no payment and brings in no orders, it is 5,000 KZT of cost every month. An expensive agent that removes a payment bigger than its price works out cheaper.

Sometimes an agent promises not to remove a payment but to bring in new orders. Then there is nothing to set it against until there is a number. That number can only come from a trial, and until the trial the price of such an agent is simply a cost.

What to work out today, before you talk to a vendor

1. Find the payment. Open three months of bank statements or payroll sheets and find the line the agent is supposed to reduce. Write down the monthly amount. If there is no such line, write zero.
2. Divide the agent's fee by that payment. The result is the share the agent has to remove just to cover itself. For the haulier it is more than two thirds.
3. Add up the first year. Set-up plus the fee for every month the contract obliges you to pay.
4. Ask in writing for the three missing lines. The model: is it included, and what is the ceiling. Your people's hours: who checks the agent's work, and how much time it takes. Changes: what the fee includes.

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