The five patterns in full.

General purpose assistants, sold per person per month. Most businesses your size already pay for at least one of them, usually because it arrived inside a licence bundle nobody read.

On its own, close to nothing, which is why so many owners conclude AI is overrated. It changes the work once someone sets it up against your work: a prompt library for the jobs your team repeats every week, a written rule about what can go near client information, and training done at people's own desks on their own tasks. Then the quote, the file note, the report and the client email stop starting from a blank page.

A per person monthly licence you are probably already paying, and nothing further to operate. The spend is the setup and the training, once. This is the cheapest and the fastest of the five, and it is where we start with most businesses.

Your contracts, procedures, policies, manuals, past correspondence and file notes are indexed so they can be searched by meaning rather than by keyword. A question goes in, the system finds the relevant passages, and the answer is written from those passages with a pointer back to where each part came from.

Your staff stop hunting through folders, shared drives and old inboxes for an answer somebody already wrote down. The answer arrives with the clause or the page attached, so it can be checked rather than trusted. A new starter reaches competence in weeks instead of months, because the knowledge stops living in the head of whoever has been there longest. And when the answer genuinely is not in your documents, a system built properly says so instead of inventing something that sounds right.

It is only ever as good as the documents you feed it. Give it procedures that are three years out of date and it will quote three year old procedures with complete confidence. Someone has to decide what goes in, keep it current, and set who is allowed to see what.

Ongoing but small: storage for the indexed documents, plus a usage charge per question asked. The effort sits at the front, in choosing and preparing the material.

It reads the receipt, pulls out the date and the amount, codes the transaction, drafts the entry and files the record in the system that holds it. A person checks the result and approves it. The AI is doing the handling, and your staff are doing the deciding.

Friction and cost. Work that used to need a person at a keyboard for twenty minutes becomes one review click. The saving shows up twice: once in the time, and again in the errors, because the repetitive step stops depending on how tired the person doing it is at five o'clock on a Friday.

A small charge per document or per transaction processed. It scales with your volume, so it stays cheap while you are small and stays proportionate as you grow. There is no seat licence to buy for people who barely touch it.

One agent drafts. One checks it against your rules. One files it and notifies the person who needs to know. Every run is logged, so you can see what ran, what it used and what it decided, and a human sits at the approval points you choose.

Throughput on repeatable multi step work. The kind of job with six steps, four systems and one person who knows the whole sequence. That sequence gets written down and run the same way every time, so it stops falling over when that person takes leave.

This is the most involved of the five and the easiest to get wrong. It only makes sense once the process itself is stable. Automate a broken process and you get the same mess, faster and harder to unpick.

The most of the five, because several models work on every job and a person still spends time approving. It earns that back on high volume repeatable work and rarely earns it anywhere else. We will tell you which one you have.

Your tone of voice, your claims and your rules are written down once, in a form the system can check against. Briefs go in one end. Drafts come out the other, already checked against those rules, ready for a person to edit and approve.

Marketing output stops depending on who has a spare afternoon. What goes out sounds the same whoever produced it, because the voice is written down and checked instead of carried around in one person's head. Volume goes up without a hire.

A usage charge per piece produced, plus the time of whoever edits and signs it off. It does not remove the editor. It removes the blank page and the drift in tone.