The AI line in your autumn budget
Budgets for next year are being written this month. Here is what belongs in that line, and the two numbers most companies forget.
September and October are when Swiss SMEs write next year’s budget. For most, the AI line is either absent or a single subscription figure copied from an invoice. Both are wrong, in ways that show up in March.
What belongs in the line
Four things. Subscriptions and usage fees, which you know. Whatever you pay your software vendors for AI features bundled into products you already have, which is often more than the first number and rarely counted. Any hosting or infrastructure. And people time.
The fourth is the one companies leave out and then feel. Somebody spends a day a month on this, whether or not anybody has said so. If you named an owner after the 8 September post, that time is now visible and should be budgeted rather than absorbed.
The two numbers most companies forget
First: the cost of usage growing. Under a per-use contract, a successful automation costs more next year than this year, because it will run more often. That is a good problem, but it is not a flat line in a spreadsheet. If your provider cannot show you a per-month split — the question from 8 August — assume growth and set a ceiling.
Second: the cost of a supplier change. Not because you plan one, but because August demonstrated that suppliers change things under you. A half-day of re-tuning, twice a year, is realistic and cheap to provide for.
What not to budget for
A large one-off project. In our experience the companies getting value from AI in Swiss SMEs are the ones spending small amounts continuously on three or four boring processes, not the ones who spent forty thousand francs once.
A reasonable shape
If you are starting from nothing, a defensible first-year line is modest and mostly people time: tools cost less than the hours spent choosing and supervising them. If the tooling number is the bigger of the two, something in the plan is probably out of proportion.