When does a small business need an AI advisor, and what does one cost?

Where most businesses are with AI right now

I was talking with a business owner I know well last week and she said something that matched what I’m seeing: most of her clients use AI at a fairly basic level and have no idea how to take it further. A few prompts in ChatGPT. Copilot summarising a meeting. Someone in the office who’s “good with it”.

The second half usually comes up a minute later: nobody has looked at security. What’s being pasted in. Which accounts it’s on. Whether client data is leaving the building.

Then there’s the tiredness. Her words were “there’s a level of fatigue that’s severe at the moment”. People are paying for tools they don’t use properly, reading about new models every week, and quietly deciding they don’t want to hear about it anymore. By October most business owners just want to finish the year. I’m in that boat some weeks too.

Her own example was an AI course she signed up for. Plenty of content, no way to work out where she sat or what the basics were for her next step. That’s the piece most businesses are missing: someone to say “you’re here, this is next, ignore the rest for now”.

What does an AI advisor do?

Not a course, and not a 40-page strategy. AI Advisor is a support line for your team, run by people who use Claude all day. In practice:

• You ask, we answer. How do I get a better result on this? Is it safe to paste that in? Why did it get this wrong? By email or chat, answered within one business day.
• We set the safe path first. What’s fine to share, what stays out of a prompt, and how your data and your clients’ data stay protected. That’s the question we get most, and the one that matters most.
• We get the whole team going, not just the one keen person. A monthly group office hours call and two 1:1 sessions a month for whoever’s stuck.
• We keep you current. A monthly note on what’s changed, which features are worth using and which prompts are worth stealing.
• We tell you when AI is the wrong answer. If Copilot suits a job better, or the answer is a spreadsheet, we say so.

When does a small business need an AI advisor?

Most businesses we talk to sit in one of three places:

• Stuck at the start. The seats are paid for. A few people had a play, got lost, and went back to the old way.
• Patchy adoption. One or two people are getting real results. Everyone else isn’t sure what to type, or whether they’re allowed to.
• Working, and ready to go further. Claude is part of how you work and now you want the workflows built properly and a number that shows it’s paying off.

The first two are what AI Advisor is for. The third is AI Advisor Pro.

You probably don’t need one if you already have an in-house AI champion and adoption is humming along, or if you just want a one-off setup and nothing after it (that’s a separate fixed-price job).

What does an AI advisor cost?

• AI Advisor: $500 a month ex GST for up to 5 users, then $100 per extra user. Works out at $100 a head for a team of five.
• AI Advisor Pro: $1,950 a month ex GST for up to 15 users, then $75 per extra user. Same-business-day responses, weekly office hours, hands-on workflow building and a quarterly report on what’s landing.
• Not on Claude yet? A one-off onboarding gets everything configured, then the subscription takes over.
• Not sure where you sit? The AI Readiness session is $2,500 ex GST: a half-day workshop, a prioritised roadmap and quarterly check-ins for a year.

No lock-in. It’s month to month, and a month’s notice is all it takes to stop. For comparison, it lands at the bottom of what most Australian businesses already pay per head for managed IT support, except this one is about getting work done rather than keeping the lights on.

Full detail on the AI Advisor page.

What’s the first step?

A 20-minute call. We’ll tell you whether AI Advisor fits, and you’ll leave with at least one job your team can hand to Claude this week. If that’s all you need, good. If you want someone on hand after that, book a call.