What does AI implementation cost in logistics, food and agri? Amounts by route (2026)

What does AI implementation cost for an SME?

That depends less on the AI than on the route you choose. The licence is the easiest item to look up. The items around it are harder to estimate: integrations with your systems, data that first has to be put in order, and the hours of your own people.

Research by Brthrs Agency and GreenPT, published by evofenedex (the Dutch association for trade and logistics businesses) on 26 February 2026, cites uncertainty about the return on investment as one of the barriers for trade and logistics companies, alongside a shortage of specialist knowledge and the quality and availability of data. A budget broken down by cost item reduces that uncertainty. You then see which amounts are fixed and which you have to estimate yourself.

We distinguish three routes:

• Route 1: setting up general AI tools, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot Business or ChatGPT Business. A fixed price per user per month.
• Route 2: an AI module or agent in your existing ERP, TMS or WMS. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central you pay per use, in Copilot Credits.
• Route 3: a custom workflow, built around one work process. Priced by quotation.

Which costs belong in an AI budget?

We do not give a general range for AI implementation in SMEs. We found no independent, substantiated source for one. The same six cost items do recur in every route, however. Use them as columns in your budget:

• Licences: a fixed price per user, or paying per use.
• Integration: connecting to your mailbox, ERP or other systems and setting permissions. Work for your administrator, your software partner or a builder.
• Data clean-up: putting master data, item descriptions, contact details and folders in order before a system works with them.
• Training: for the people who work with the system and check its output.
• Internal hours: your own employees' time for describing the process, testing, training and checking. This item does not appear on any quotation.
• Ongoing guidance and management: making adjustments, adding new uses and an owner who monitors consumption and quality.

Route 1: what do Copilot Business and ChatGPT Business cost?

This route requires the least build work. You buy licences for a general AI assistant and gear its use to your own tasks, such as customer emails, meeting minutes, non-conformity reports and work instructions. Microsoft and OpenAI publish their prices themselves. On 11 October 2026 they listed the following. The cost table for route 1:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licence, called Copilot Bedrijven on the Dutch page: €18.20 per user per month on an annual subscription with annual billing. With the promotion from 1 July to 31 December 2026 inclusive, that is €15.60, in the first year only and with an annual commitment. Microsoft reserves the right to cancel, change or suspend the offer at any time. For a monthly subscription, the page quotes €21.84. Copilot Business is an add-on to Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium, for a maximum of 300 licences per tenant.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, for organisations with more than 300 users: €26.00 per user per month, annual subscription.
• ChatGPT Business licence: $20 per user per month with annual billing and $25 with monthly billing, with a minimum of two seats. A Premium seat with higher usage limits costs $100 or $125. If you wish, you can buy usage above the limits as credits. OpenAI gives the prices in dollars and states that the price may vary by country and currency.
• Integration: no build work is needed for the standard features. Do allow for hours from your administrator or partner for the set-up and for the agreements on what may and may not go into the tool.
• Data clean-up: review the permissions on shared folders, SharePoint sites and Teams channels before the assistant works with them. Fill this in as internal hours.
• Training: the AI Business Academy Practice Day costs from €2,500 per group of up to twelve participants. The Online Learning Track costs from €500 per person.
• Internal hours: fill these in using the calculation template later in this article.
• Guidance: optional. Ongoing guidance from AI Business Academy costs from €1,750 per month.

What does that mean for 25 users?

A worked example, not a quotation. With 25 users, Copilot Business costs €390 per month at the promotional price, €4,680 in the first year. From the second year, at the regular annual price, that is €5,460 per year. For 25 users with annual billing, ChatGPT Business costs $6,000 per year, based on the dollar price. According to OpenAI, VAT is not charged if you enter your VAT number as a business at checkout.

Do not compare the two on price alone. Copilot Business works in apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams and requires a Microsoft 365 business subscription. ChatGPT Business is a standalone workspace. What the Copilot licence does not cover, how exactly the promotion works and how to measure in 30 days whether it pays off is set out in our article on Copilot Business: costs, trial and what to measure.

Route 2: what does an AI agent in your ERP, TMS or WMS cost?

The second route is an AI feature that comes with your existing package. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a well-documented example. The Sales Order Agent turns email requests into quotes and orders. The Payables Agent turns PDF purchase invoices into drafts that an employee reviews. Both are included in the product, but usage is billed separately in Copilot Credits.

According to Microsoft Learn, the number of credits depends on what the agent does. Microsoft publishes a rate per action. The cost table for route 2:

• Sales Order Agent: 2 credits for analysing an incoming email, 5 per attachment containing order data (2 if it contains no order data), 5 for the availability check, 5 for creating or updating a quote or order and 2 for the reply email.
• Payables Agent: 50 credits per invoice plus 5 per invoice line. Emails without a valid invoice attachment cost nothing.
• Expense Agent, still in preview: 50 credits per uploaded receipt.
• Price of the credits: Microsoft sells packs of 25,000 Copilot Credits for €173.30 per pack per month. You can also pay as you go through an Azure subscription that your partner links. You then pay at the end of the month for what has been consumed.
• Integration: setting up billing in the Business Central admin centre, setting up a Microsoft 365 mailbox with the right permissions and defining the agent's permissions. Hours from your partner or administrator.
• Data clean-up: the order agent recognises a customer only by the email address on the contact card. The better the descriptions, attributes and categories, the better it finds items. That work is done in advance.
• Training: for the employees who review every outgoing email and every draft. Microsoft has the order agent first submit all outgoing messages to a designated employee.
• Guidance and management: someone who monitors consumption, sets a daily limit for the number of emails and switches the agent off when it is not needed.

How many credits does an agent use per month?

Microsoft works through two examples itself. One hundred order requests per month, half of them with a usable attachment, cost 1,650 credits. One hundred invoices with three lines each cost 6,500 credits. Both fit comfortably within one pack. Converted at the pack price, that is about €11 and €45 per month, but only if you use the pack in full. You buy the pack in units of 25,000 credits, and all Business Central environments and other Microsoft services in your tenant draw on the same capacity.

Take two more points into account. If the credits run out, the order agent stops handling new emails. As soon as credits are available again, it automatically processes all the emails that were left waiting, and that can cost a lot of credits in one go. In addition, Dutch is not on the list of languages for which Microsoft has validated the order agent, and the invoice agent has been validated in English only. According to Microsoft, the agents can work in other languages, but possibly not as intended. So test with your own Dutch-language emails and invoices before you base your budget on these numbers.

If you use a different ERP, TMS or WMS package, ask the vendor three things: how usage is billed, what a processed order or invoice costs in a trial with your own data, and which limits you can set yourself. What an agent may do on its own and where the human decides is set out in AI agents in operations: what may an agent do on its own?

Route 3: what does a custom AI workflow cost?

Sometimes no standard feature fits. Examples are freight documents that have to be read into your own TMS, a check of temperature records against the control measures in your HACCP plan, or a planning proposal based on your own historical data. In that case a workflow is built around one work process. These examples are illustrative, not client stories.

There is no fixed price for this route, and we do not give a range either. The costs depend on the number of integrations, the state of your data and the number of exceptions in the process. An honest quotation starts with a clearly defined process and a baseline measurement. The cost table for route 3:

• Licences and consumption: the platform on which the workflow runs. If you build on Microsoft Copilot Studio, the same Copilot Credits apply as in route 2, with a rate per response and per action.
• Integration and build: a quotation from the builder. Ask for a fixed price for a clearly defined first version, or for an estimate of hours with a ceiling. At AI Business Academy, a full implementation runs through our build partner, with a price on request.
• Data clean-up: internal and external hours to make master data and historical data usable. Fill these in using the calculation template.
• Hosting, management and maintenance: a monthly amount from the builder or your IT partner. Ask what happens if an underlying language model changes or disappears.
• Training: the Practice Day costs from €2,500 per group of up to twelve participants.
• Guidance: ongoing guidance costs from €1,750 per month.

What questions should you ask about a quotation for a custom workflow?

A quotation for route 3 can only be compared once you have had these questions answered:

• Which process is included in the price, and what falls outside it?
• What are the monthly costs after delivery, including consumption of the language model?
• Who owns the workflow, the instructions and the data?
• How can you see afterwards what the system did at each step?
• What does it cost to switch to another party?

How do you calculate the internal hours?

Internal hours do not appear on any quotation, and yet they belong in every route. We deliberately give no figures for them. They vary by company and by process, and an average would mislead you. Use this template. Fill in the hours on each line and multiply them by your internal hourly cost, as used by your finance department.

• Describing the process and baseline measurement: hours of the process owner and the colleagues involved × hourly cost.
• Data clean-up: hours per type of master data, such as customers, items and suppliers × hourly cost.
• Set-up and testing with your own data: hours of the administrator and key users × hourly cost.
• Training: number of participants × hours per training session × hourly cost. For a Practice Day, that is one working day per participant.
• Checks in the first months: checks per week × minutes per check × number of weeks, converted to hours × hourly cost.
• Management afterwards: hours per month of the process owner × hourly cost × 12.

When does AI implementation pay for itself?

Set the total of licences, external costs and internal hours against the time savings you actually measure after the baseline measurement, not against an expectation. Include the time for checking and correction, otherwise the gain comes out too high. With our calculator (in Dutch) you can convert time freed up on a recurring task into an annual amount, based on your own assumptions.

Does the SLIM subsidy help pay for AI implementation?

Not for licences, build work or training. SLIM (the Dutch subsidy scheme for learning and development in SMEs) pays for the plan, not for carrying it out and not for the training. The scheme subsidises a company review that results in a training or development plan, career or development advice, and support in developing or introducing a learning and development method. Licences and build work are not among them. For the company review and the learning method, Article 2.15 of the SLIM-regeling (the ministerial regulation that governs the scheme) also excludes training costs (point h) and costs arising from legally required tasks (point g).

For the company review and the learning method, the subsidy is 60 percent of the eligible costs, and those costs must amount to at least €5,000. For an individual SME application, the regulation gives a maximum of €25,000. Uitvoering van Beleid (the agency that runs SLIM) applies €24,999. For agricultural businesses the maximum is €20,000. A decision on an application is made within 13 weeks of the application window closing. The application windows for 2027 have not yet been published.

So do not count on the subsidy to cover licences, build work or training days. What you can already prepare for 2027 is set out in SLIM subsidy 2027: what is fixed and how to prepare.

Which route suits your company?

Start with the process, not with the route. If the bottleneck is mainly in email, documents and meetings, route 1 has the most predictable licence costs: a fixed price per user. If the process runs in your ERP and your vendor supplies an agent for it, route 2 is the obvious choice, provided you first measure consumption in a trial with your own data. Route 3 only comes into play when no standard feature fits and the process has enough volume to justify the build.

In all three routes, the licence is the easiest item to look up. Training, internal hours and data are items you have to estimate yourself. How to choose training for your team and which formats and prices exist side by side is explained in Choosing in-company AI training: costs, formats and what to look for.

In three questions, the free Practice Scan shows where best to start, with the first use case and the data you need for it. With that choice you can fill in the cost table for the route that fits, using your own figures.