"AI integration" is one of those phrases that means everything and nothing.

Ask five people selling it and you will get five answers.

So here is what it means when we say it, what it costs, and how to work out which part of it your business actually needs.

Integration is not a chatbot on your website

A chatbot is a feature.

Integration is AI doing a job that a person in your business currently does by hand, inside the systems you already use.

The difference shows up in your week.

A feature is something else to check. Integration is something you stop doing.

If a tool does not remove work from somebody's week, it has not been integrated. It has been installed.

There are only two kinds of AI work, and they are priced differently

Almost everything we build for New Zealand businesses falls into one of two buckets.

Work we run for you. You never open it, never learn it, never maintain it. We run the thing and you get what comes out. Lead lists worth calling. A month of social content written, made and scheduled for you to approve. Site visits and phone calls coming back as written notes and actions that nobody typed up.

Tools built into your business. These you own and run. A quoting engine built around your rates and the way you scope a job. Scheduling that accounts for travel, skills and priority. A dashboard that says what needs you today. A chatbot trained on your own pricing and policies, so it answers the way you would.

The first kind is a monthly service and starts working the week it is turned on.

The second kind is a build. It takes longer and it is worth more, because at the end of it you own the thing.

Most businesses need one of each, and almost nobody needs both on day one.

Start with the job that eats the week

For most trades and manufacturers in New Zealand, that job is quoting.

It is the work that follows you home. It happens at night, on the couch, after a full day on the tools, and it is the reason a lot of owners have not had a clean weekend in years.

It is also the job AI is genuinely good at, because quoting is a rules problem wearing a judgement costume. Your rates are known. Your margins are known. What varies is the scope and the site.

Run the numbers on your own business before you believe anyone, including us.

Ten quotes a week at forty five minutes each is seven and a half hours. With a quoting engine built around your rates, that is about two. Call it five or six hours back, every week, forever.

We built one of these for a Canterbury scaffolding company. Quoting is the job that eats evenings in most trades, so it is usually the first thing we look at.

If quoting is not your bottleneck, do not start there. Start wherever the hours actually go.

What it costs, plainly

Our AI integration prices are fixed and published, because "it depends" is not a price.

A proper start is $750 one off and $97 a month. That is half a day on your actual jobs, your workspace set up, and the three tasks wasting the most time sorted out.

Taking one whole job off your plate is $2,500 one off and $297 a month. One tool built around your work, connected to Zoho or whatever CRM you run, and your team shown how to use it.

AI running whole jobs end to end starts at $6,000 plus a monthly fee, scoped per business.

Fixed prices exist so you can decide without booking a meeting to find out whether you can afford the meeting.

The three questions worth asking any AI provider

What does this remove from my week? If the answer is a feature list rather than a number of hours, keep asking.

Who runs it when it breaks? Software that nobody owns becomes shelfware within a quarter. Ask who is responsible in month six.

What happens to my data? You are entitled to a straight answer about where your documents, pricing and customer details go, and who can see them.

A provider who cannot answer the third one clearly is not ready to be trusted with your business.

Where to start if you are not sure

Most owners know something is eating their week. They just cannot point at it.

The AI Opportunity Check is twelve questions and about four minutes. It scores where your time actually goes and tells you what to automate first.

It will also tell you if AI is not your bottleneck, which is the answer for more businesses than the market wants to admit.

Before any of it, read AI will not fix a broken process. Automating a mess gets you a faster mess, and the order you do this in matters more than the tools you choose.

If you want to talk it through, AI consulting and integration is what we do, from Christchurch, with businesses right across New Zealand.