When I talk to SME owners about AI, the first questions are almost always about cost — and almost everyone estimates it wrong. The language model itself is surprisingly cheap: a complete customer conversation with a well-configured assistant costs mere cents in API usage. With smart caching of the fixed instructions, even less.
So where does the real investment sit? In the setup: the assistant has to know your business, know what it must never promise, and deliver enquiries to a human in a clean, structured form. An assistant that answers technical questions and prepares quote requests is a different thing from a chat widget that says "hello".
And then the question that really matters for Dutch companies: where does the data live? We build assistants so the keys stay server-side, data can be hosted in the EU, and nobody trains on your customer data. GDPR-proof isn't a marketing term — it's a series of concrete architectural choices.
Curious what this means for your business? There's subsidy available in Overijssel that significantly reduces these projects — ask us about the options.
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