What does an AI consultant cost per employee?

Why price by team size at all

The two working sessions we run every month cost us about the same whether you have three people or thirty. What changes is the payoff. Every process we fix together saves time for every person who touches it. A scheduling automation for a two-person shop saves two people's hours. The same automation for a 30-person shop saves thirty. So the bigger the team, the more total time comes back, and the price should follow that. It also means the smallest shops get the best deal in absolute dollars, which we think is exactly right for where most Oklahoma businesses are.

The price per head

Here's the tier table and what it works out to per person at the top of each band. Real teams land somewhere in the middle, so your number is a little higher.

For comparison, here's what those same businesses already pay per seat for things nobody questions:

• Managed IT in OKC and Tulsa: $95 to $200 per user per month, per 2026 pricing guides from local providers.
• Outsourced HR or a PEO: most full-service plans land between $100 and $150 per employee per month.
• ChatGPT Team, Claude Team, or Microsoft Copilot: $20 to $30 per seat per month, on top of whatever else you're paying.

So at Crew, the concierge lands inside the range of the IT contract, and at Shop and up it costs less per head. The difference is that IT keeps the computers running. This makes the people faster.

What an Oklahoma hour actually costs

Here's where "remember this is Oklahoma" matters. Coastal consultants price against coastal wages. We don't.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes average weekly wages by county. As of the end of 2025:

That's wages, not cost. Payroll tax, insurance, workers comp, the desk, the laptop, and the training all sit on top. We walk through this in our lunch and learn talks: a $40,000 employee really costs about $67,000 a year, and after vacation, sick days, holidays, and meetings they put in roughly 1,700 productive hours. Call it $40 an hour fully loaded for an OKC or Tulsa employee, and about $33 for Stillwater.

The break-even math

Take a Crew client at $1,500 a month with eight people in Stillwater. At $33 an hour loaded, the concierge has to save 45 hours a month across the whole team to pay for itself. That's about 1.3 hours per person per week.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis surveyed workers in 2024 and found the ones who actually use generative AI save about 2.2 hours a week. Our job is turning "actually use" into "everybody on the team, for the tasks that matter." At the Fed's number, that eight-person crew gets back 76 hours a month. Even at one hour a week each, it's 35 hours, most of the way there before you count the owner, and that's before you count the owner's hours, which are worth a lot more than $33.

Now run it at Shop. Twenty people in Tulsa at $40 an hour. $2,250 a month is 56 hours. One hour a week each is 87 hours. The bigger the team, the sillier the comparison gets, which is the whole reason the price climbs. You're paying more and getting a wildly better ratio.

The catch, stated plainly

None of this happens if the automations don't get used. That's the part most AI spending gets wrong, and it's why the Shop and Company tiers include team sessions and rollout help instead of just more of the owner's time. We wrote up why most AI pilots never make it out of pilot if you want the ugly numbers on that.

Run your own numbers

Paste this into whatever AI you already use:

I run a small business in Oklahoma with [NUMBER] employees. Our average wage is about $[AMOUNT] an hour. Assume fully loaded cost is 1.3 times that. If I hire a consultant for $[PRICE] a month to help my team automate repetitive work, how many hours per month does the team need to save for it to break even? Then show me what happens if each person saves 1 hour a week, and 2.2 hours a week. Show the math in a simple table.

If the answer makes you wince in the good way, the AI Concierge page has the tiers and the intake form is the front door.