Money

What AI enablement costs in Australia

We don't publish a price for our own work, and the reason is on this page. What is here instead is every number we do have, with its source: what the licences cost per seat, what the salaried version of this role is advertised at, and the arithmetic for what one process is already costing you before anyone sells you anything.

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Our own fee

We don't publish a price.

We don't publish a price, because the honest one depends on the size of your business and how many teams are in scope. Discovery is quoted in writing before it starts, and the Rollout price comes out of Discovery, also in writing, before you commit to anything.

Every business is a different shape, so any price quoted before anyone has looked at the work is a guess wearing a number. A figure on a website is a marketing decision rather than a quote: it gets set for the business the firm wishes had called, and then the scope moves to meet it.

So this page does the other thing. It gives you the numbers that are real and checkable, so you can do the arithmetic yourself before you speak to anyone.

Start here

The first number is yours, not ours.

Before any fee is worth discussing, work out what the process you want fixed is costing you to run today. Every AI consulting conversation in Australia should start with this figure and most of them start with a rate card instead.

The arithmetic

People who touch the job, times hours a week each, times what an hour of their time costs you, times 46 working weeks.

Invoicing, quoting, reporting, onboarding, chasing approvals for work that is already agreed: whatever the workflow is in your business, someone is doing it every week and it is already on your payroll. That is the whole calculation, and there is a version of it with sliders in the pricing section of the home page. It asserts nothing. People, hours and rate are all yours to set, the only constant is the 46 weeks, and it computes what the process costs to run today. It does not claim a saving, a percentage or an hours back figure, because we have not measured one on your business and will not invent one.

Weeks a year is 46, not 52. That is 52 less the four weeks of annual leave in the National Employment Standards, less roughly two more weeks of public holidays and personal leave. It is the conservative direction, which is the right direction for a number being used to argue for a fee.

The rate field is seeded at $55. That comes from the ABS Average Weekly Earnings, Australia: full-time adult average weekly ordinary time earnings, seasonally adjusted, $2,083.70 for the reference period May 2026, divided by 38 hours, which is $54.83. That is base ordinary time earnings. It excludes superannuation and on-costs, so what a person actually costs you to employ is higher than the default, and the field is yours to overwrite.

All figures on this page are Australian dollars unless the currency says otherwise.

What the tools cost

Per seat, per month, from each vendor's own page.

This is third party pricing, not ours. We don't sell licences and we take no vendor commission, so a tool recommendation is only ever that. For most small business and SME rollouts this is the entire running cost of the software, and it is often already on your invoice.

  • Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, AU$37.68 per user per month billed monthly, or AU$26.91 paid yearly. It is an add-on, so a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence sits underneath it.
  • Microsoft 365 Copilot, the add-on for enterprise plans, AU$44.90 per user per month paid yearly, AU$47.15 billed monthly.
  • Claude Team, US$20 per seat per month billed annually, US$25 billed monthly, for teams of 2 to 150.
  • Claude Enterprise, US$20 per seat per month plus usage at API rates, billed annually. The seat fee covers access and no usage, and the published minimum is 20 seats self-serve or 50 through sales.
  • ChatGPT Business, US$20 per user per month billed annually, or US$25 billed monthly, minimum two seats. OpenAI lists and charges these in US dollars, so what you pay moves with the exchange rate. ChatGPT Enterprise is priced on application.

The waste in this line is rarely the price. It is the half of the seats belonging to people who opened the thing twice and never went back, and the same cost running three times over: a Microsoft bundle, a Claude seat, a ChatGPT seat. No licence seller measures your split. Discovery measures it.

Third party pricing, not ours, from each vendor's own page, checked 24 August 2026. Microsoft Australia and its enterprise page: all figures exclude GST, and the AU$26.91 yearly price is promotional until 30 September 2026, after which Microsoft lists AU$31.40. Anthropic: US dollars, as Anthropic publishes them, with the Enterprise seat minimums from Anthropic's own support page. OpenAI: US dollars, as OpenAI publishes and charges them, with Enterprise the only tier OpenAI does not publish.

The other way to buy this

The in-house version has a published number.

What this replaces

A salaried AI Enablement Lead in Melbourne is advertised at $166,939 to $191,084 a year.

That is a live Victorian public sector role, advertised August 2026, for the work described across this site: finding the use cases, writing the policy, training the staff, and measuring whether any of it landed.

Sitting on top of that salary are recruitment, onboarding, leave, equipment, the months it takes a new hire to learn your business, and the risk that the person you hired is the wrong one. Large organisations create the role because the work is worth doing. A smaller business rarely needs it five days a week and almost never gets to justify the hire.

Anum is that function for the part of the week you genuinely need it, starting the week you engage us rather than three months after you start recruiting.

Advertised range taken from AI Enablement & Capability Lead, Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner, August 2026. It matches the published Victorian Public Service grade 6.2 band effective 1 May 2026.

Market context

What other Australian firms publish.

Some firms in this market do print a figure. If you are building a budget those are useful reference points, and they belong to them rather than to us.

  • IOTAI, on its Melbourne AI consulting page, says that as a guide its Retool development projects typically range from $5,000 to $25,000 depending on complexity.
  • Free Me Up publishes a 90-Day AI Pilot from $5,500 plus GST, a Full Stack tier from $8,500 plus GST, and hourly advisory at $200 per hour plus GST.

Both pages were read at source on 10 September 2026. Their scope is not our scope and we make no claim about what either firm would charge you, or about what we would. They are here because the question is a fair one and a page about cost that answers it with nothing is worse than useless.

How ours gets agreed

A free call, then a number in writing before anything starts.

The free 30 minute call. Nothing is paid before it, and there is nothing to prepare for it. It is where we work out whether there is anything here worth doing at all.

Discovery is the paid entry point. How long it takes depends on the size of the business and the number of teams in scope. The length and the price are both agreed with you in writing before the work starts. It ends with a written opportunity map, a baseline, a do not automate list, a training session for your team, and a Rollout proposal, scoped and priced.

If Discovery leads to a Rollout and you proceed within 60 days, we credit the Discovery fee towards the implementation. If you don't proceed, everything produced through Discovery is still yours and there is nothing else to pay.

The Rollout is priced at the end of Discovery, from what is actually there. Scope and price are fixed in writing before any work starts, and priced on the teams, the people and the number of use cases in scope. Payment is 50% on start and 50% on completion, seven day terms.

The Fractional AI Lead is optional and comes after. Scoped around how much ongoing support you actually need, from monthly advisory through to regular days each week. Minimum three months, then month to month with 30 days notice either way, invoiced monthly in advance. Every quarter you get a written read on whether the AI spend is still earning, and that includes what you pay us. If we can't show it is, you can end the engagement there, without the 30 days notice and with nothing further to pay.

The guarantees

On Discovery

If we do not identify at least one AI use case with a clear payback inside six months, we will tell you the Rollout is not worth it yet, and refund the Discovery fee.

On the Rollout

If fewer than 70% of trained staff are still using the new workflow 30 days after we finish, we come back and retrain at no charge until they are.

This holds where you release your staff for the training sessions we schedule.

What the work actually is, step by step: AI consulting in Melbourne. Who it is for and where the automation usually lands: AI for small and medium businesses. Written for a sector: professional services and trades and wholesale.

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