What does an AI department really cost?

The honest comparison is not the price of a tool. It is the role you would otherwise create. And that role costs more than the contract says. An ki-department costs 4,800 euros net per month, everything included, cancellable at any time. Whoever needs newsletters, blog posts, social media and presentations every week eventually hires someone. On paper 3,800 euros gross. For the company add employer contributions, holidays, sick leave, onboarding and the laptop. Counted honestly, that is well over 5,000 euros a month for one person with 38 hours who may leave after a year. A department costs 4,800 euros net per month. The price is guaranteed for the first twelve months. It can be cancelled at any time, and whoever leaves gets everything that was built handed over.

What the monthly price covers

Two rules keep that price honest. Normal operation is fully included, and only unusual production volumes, a large batch of videos for example, get planned together in advance and are then passed on at cost, with no markup. Every additional brand costs 1,500 euros net a month, because it gets its own knowledge library and its own approval owners. In the running mandate there are three brands.

  • Leading the department, plus a weekly standing meeting with you.
  • Every strategy meeting and every workshop, with no day rate on top.
  • A machine in your office or cloud compute, plus servers, hosting, tool licences and API costs.
  • As many agents as make professional sense, with no surcharge per agent.
  • Building and maintaining the knowledge about your brand.
  • The approval platform where every draft waits, including the learning loop from your feedback.

Why the comparison still limps

One person can do one thing at a time. A department with eleven agents can do eleven. But a person can take responsibility, and no agent can. That is exactly why approval stays with you: nothing leaves the building before a human clicks approve.

I asked more than 200 people whether they wanted the full-time role at MyGym. Nobody did. People who truly understand AI leverage do not take a job for 3,000 to 5,000 euros a month. That is no reproach, that is the market. The long version is in the note on why nobody applied for that role.

So the comparison sits at the beginning of every mandate, out in the open. A mandate only starts when the department is plausibly the better deal in exactly that comparison. If your own role is the smarter answer, I say so in the first conversation.

The first month

The first money goes into building, and the building follows a week plan.

From your side this needs one contact person with about four hours a week. That person approves, answers questions, and brings us the knowledge that exists only inside your company. That person writes no texts.

When you commission a department, I set up a personal AI workplace for the management once: a preparation call, email drafts in your own voice, the company knowledge as a second brain, phone and assistant connected. That is openly my own interest. A managing director who uses AI every day works with us at eye level.

  • Week one: we collect your knowledge. What you say, how you sound, what you would never claim.
  • Week two: rules and connections. The guardian of the brand is built first, then the systems you already work in.
  • Week three: the first drafts wait for your approval.
  • Week four: your feedback turns into rules, and from there the checks run on their own.

What came out of three months

Three months in, the department ran across three brands. The presentation agent built a real trade fair keynote, 36 slides, 389 shapes, 75 images, for FIBO 2026. How deeply something gets checked depends on the format: a newsletter runs through up to 21 automatic checks, a blog post through 48 content checks and 26 platform checks. All of it sits inside the same monthly price. You can read all of it in the approved case study on the mandate.

From the running mandate

DSB-ONE / MyGym, Salzburg. Agreement of 22 May 2026, case study, status 13 August 2026.

  • Eleven agents built, three brands connected
  • A dedicated approval platform in production
  • Up to 21 automatic checks per draft before a human sees it
  • 48 content checks and 26 platform checks per blog post
  • The first blog post was produced fully automatically, with all checks
  • 520 club app items, 3,542 Canva designs, Odoo and Teams connected

Department worksheet

The calculation from the note to fill in yourself: role versus department, with every factor. PDF · A4, 1 pages, 41 KB, as of 3 September 2026.

This note keeps growing

2026-09-03: Grown: the six parts of the monthly price, the compute cost rule, the week plan of the [[setupmonat|setup month]], the four hours of the contact person, more evidence from the case study, a source list.

2026-09-02: Calculator added, price set to 4,800 all-in, margin note on the workshop credit.

2026-08-22: Paragraph on the full-time role sharpened after a partner conversation.

2026-08-14: Planted from the case study.

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