Will this actually save my business money?
Headlines say the price of artificial intelligence is plunging, and they are right about the price of a token, the small unit of text in which providers sell their models. But a business does not buy tokens. It buys finished work: a correct booking, a contract that holds, a product description a customer can trust. That cost is made up mostly of things the token price does not touch.
The Price of a Thought counts them. It introduces the five lines of the full bill: the model, the review, the errors, the fixed costs and a reserve for the day the provider changes its prices or its model. It follows composite businesses across Europe, from a bookkeeping firm in Graz whose AI invoice rose after its provider cut prices to a web agency in Utrecht, an HR consultancy in Lyon and a bakery in Ghent. Along the way it looks at failures and retries, the cost of checking machine work, the energy and hardware behind every answer, dependence on a provider, and the human hours that remain.
The book closes with a cost model a small business can use and a one-page worksheet that turns a few rough numbers into an estimate for one task. Some tasks come out ahead; some cost more with AI than without.
Written for owners, managers and budget holders in European small and mid-sized businesses. No technical background is needed. Every number has a named source, and every price is dated. Not investment, legal, tax or financial advice.
