SMB leaders often assume AI is enterprise-priced. That was true two years ago. It's not true today.
Direct costs are falling fast. A team of ten can get capable AI tools for $200-600/month. API costs have dropped roughly 90% in 18 months and continue to fall.
The real cost is implementation. Making AI useful requires workflow design, prompt engineering, system integration, and training. For most SMBs, implementation cost is 3-5x the software cost in year one. After that, costs drop dramatically because the workflows are built.
Token economics. A typical business email costs $0.01-0.05 to process. A long document analysis might cost $0.50-2.00. Where costs can spike is in agent workflows that make 20-50 sequential API calls. Even then, you're usually talking dollars, not hundreds.
The cost of waiting. If AI saves each employee two hours per week across twenty employees at $40/hour blended cost, that's $83,000 per year in recaptured productivity. Against a first-year investment of $15,000-30,000, the math isn't close.