Every AI pricing page shows you a per-user monthly figure. Almost nobody budgets from that figure and lands anywhere near what they actually spend, because the licence is the smallest line in the first year.
Here is a full costing for a ten-person UK business in 2026, with the lines that usually get left out put back in.
Line 1: assistant licences
Two broad options, and most businesses end up with a bit of both.
Microsoft 365 Copilot sits inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and SharePoint, and reads your own tenancy content. Priced at roughly £22 per user per month on an annual commitment. From 1 July 2026, Microsoft restructured its business plans: Business Standard and Business Premium became available as permanent plans with Copilot included, alongside a lower-cost Copilot tier for smaller businesses. That changes the comparison — it is now often cheaper to move plan than to add a licence.
A general assistant such as ChatGPT Business or Claude for Work costs around £20 per user per month and is stronger at long-form drafting, analysis and working outside the Microsoft estate.
For a ten-person business piloting properly, that is four licences rather than ten. Call it £1,000 to £1,100 a year.
Line 2: the plan underneath
Copilot needs a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence beneath it, and this is where the July 2026 price rise bites. UK business plan prices rose in the region of twelve to seventeen per cent on renewal.
If you were on Business Basic and need Business Standard or Premium to get the features you want, that is a genuine increase to budget for, not an AI cost as such but one that arrives in the same conversation. For ten users the step from Basic to Standard is a few hundred pounds a year; the step to Business Premium is more, and buys you the security features covered in this article.
Line 3: setup and cleanup — the one nobody budgets
This is the largest first-year line and the one most often missing from the business case.
- Permissions review. Before Copilot goes live, somebody needs to find out what is over-shared in SharePoint and OneDrive, because Copilot makes it findable in plain English. One to two days.
- Document tidying. Getting the twenty or thirty documents that answer common questions into one place and archiving what they superseded. One to three days depending on how long you have been trading.
- Tenancy configuration. Retention policies, sensitivity labels, which apps may be connected, guest access review. One day.
Realistically £1,500 to £3,500 for a business of this size. Skip it and you will spend the money anyway, in the form of a tool your team stops trusting after it confidently quotes a 2023 price list at a customer.
Line 4: training
Not a webinar. Half a day, hands on, using real work, for the people who have licences. Then a second short session six weeks later once they have hit the limits and have real questions.
Budget £500 to £1,200. This line has the best return of any on the list and is the first one cut, which is why so many licences go unused.
Line 5: automated workflows
The point at which AI stops being an assistant and starts being infrastructure. Connecting the inbox to the CRM, extracting invoice data into the finance system, generating a draft quote from a form submission.
Run charges are small — a few pounds a month per flow through Power Automate or Make. The build is the cost, typically £800 to £2,500 for the first two or three flows depending on how cooperative the systems are. This is business automation work rather than a licence purchase, and it is usually where the largest measurable saving comes from.
The whole picture
For a ten-person UK business doing this properly rather than performatively:
- Assistant licences — £1,000 to £1,100
- Plan uplift, if needed — £300 to £900
- Setup and cleanup — £1,500 to £3,500
- Training — £500 to £1,200
- First automated workflows — £800 to £2,500
Year one: roughly £4,100 to £9,200. Year two is largely just licences and run charges, so somewhere between £1,500 and £3,000 unless you build more.
What that has to save to be worth it
At the midpoint of about £6,500, and with a fully loaded cost of employment of roughly £22 an hour for an administrator, you need to save around six hours a week across the business to break even in year one. Not six hours per person. Six hours in total.
That is a low bar for a business where anybody writes proposals, processes supplier invoices or triages a shared inbox. It is an impossible bar for a business that buys ten licences, provides no training and connects nothing.
The difference between AI paying for itself and not is almost never which model you chose. It is whether anybody did the unglamorous middle three lines.
Where to start if the budget is tight
Two licences, half a day of training and the permissions review. Roughly £1,200 all in. Run it for a quarter on one task, measure it and expand from evidence rather than optimism.
If you would like the setup and cleanup lines quoted properly for your business rather than guessed at, our IT consultancy team will scope it in an afternoon. Ask for an AI readiness quote and we will give you real numbers for your tenancy rather than industry averages.
