AI Pricing: A Technical Breakdown of the Cost and Revenue Opportunities

Learn about the total cost of ownership of operating AI models in a business environment.

Introduction

• Considering the cost of AI

1. Build vs. Buy

• Framing build vs. buy in an AI context
• Setup vs. ongoing costs
• Selecting the right models for the tasks
• SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS in the context of AI

2. Costs of Using an AI API

• Introduction to AI as an API
• Introduction to AI as a platform
• Setup costs for AI APIs
• Ongoing costs for AI APIs
• Estimating cost for a translation feature
• Estimating cost for a RAG solution: What is RAG?
• Estimating cost for a RAG solution: Costs of RAG
• Estimating costs for an image generation feature
• Challenge: Estimating the cost of a book summarization
• Solution: Estimating the cost of a book summarization

3. Examining Major Vendor Pricing

• Diving into ChatGPT pricing (OpenAI)
• Diving into Anthropic-based pricing
• Diving into Google AI pricing
• Diving into AWS Bedrock pricing
• Diving into Azure AI-based pricing
• Diving into Hugging Face-based pricing

4. Costs of Training AI

• Overview of technical components and tooling
• Setting up an AI training cluster
• Cost of compute for training AI models
• Data cleanliness and sourcing
• Data movement and storage
• AI model training iteration and evaluation
• Tracking AI experiments
• Fine-tuning models
• Hiring the team that trains the models
• Challenge: Training AI for your enterprise
• Solution: Training AI for your enterprise
• Challenge: Training AI for your start-up
• Solution: Training AI for your start-up

5. Costs of Hosting AI

• Hosting and running your AI models
• Running your own models or outsourcing
• Choosing the right hardware for AI models
• Logging and monitoring AI inference
• Hiring the team for AI inference
• Challenge: Running AI for your start-up
• Solution: Running AI for your start-up
• Challenge: Running AI for your enterprise
• Solution: Running AI for your enterprise

6. Other Costs

• AI copyright and legal risks
• AI reputational risks
• AI security risks
• AI impact on service level agreements
• AI's environmental impacts

7. Revenue-Generating Models

• Unit and margin pricing for AI
• Time consumption pricing for AI
• Value-based pricing for AI
• Subscription pricing for AI
• Start-up funding and grant programs for AI
• Challenge: Pricing your logo generator
• Solution: Pricing your logo generator
• Building a business case for AI projects
• Building a financial projection for AI projects
• Challenge: Building an AI business case
• Solution: Building an AI business case

Conclusion

• Next steps