What your AI costs to run, and what it returns
If an AI system works but the economics do not, we baseline its run cost, usage and value, then identify what to change or stop. This is part of the diagnosis within Fix & Optimise.
Use the cheapest model that reliably does the job. Escalate only when the task needs it.
Much AI spend goes on frontier-model prices for tasks a far cheaper model would do reliably. The same test applies to the consulting around it.
What we baseline
Every workload ends up in one of four columns: scale, optimise, redesign or stop.
Spend
Model and API spend, licences, infrastructure, vector and search costs, agent and tooling costs, external consulting and duplicated subscriptions.
Token economics
Input and output volumes, prompt size, context-window usage, repeated context, cacheability, embedding volume, unnecessary agent turns and output verbosity.
Model choice
Where frontier models are earning their price and where smaller, specialist or open-weight models would reliably do the job. Routing, fallbacks and quality thresholds.
Architecture economics
Caching, batching, asynchronous processing, retrieval strategy, context trimming, deterministic code versus model reasoning, and hosted versus self-hosted trade-offs.
Business value
Per workload: what it costs, what it produces, cost per task, value per task and the confidence behind the evidence.
Sample extract
What the review produces
An illustrative extract, not client data. The real thing carries your spend, your workloads and your evidence.
TechGuidr
Sample extractAI cost and value review: summary
- Frontier-model traffic
- Most requests, and most of it routine extraction and classification
- Cache hit rate
- Effectively zero; identical questions regenerated in full every time
- Routable to smaller models
- A large share of traffic at equal reliability
- Workload verdicts
- One to scale, two to optimise, one to redesign, one to stop
- Next step
- Change the routing and caching first; switch off the workload that isn't used
The AI bill is growing faster than the value
Two or three sentences on your estate is enough to start. The review is scoped and priced as part of Fix & Optimise.