How a 2M revenue service business should split 40K of AI budget across voice, chat, internal tools, and pilots. With the actual line items.
A 2M revenue service business asked me how to spend 40K on AI this year. Below is the line-item budget we built. It is not the only right answer, but it is the one I have seen pay back the fastest across about 60 deals. What to measure in the first 30 days Most teams measure too many things and then measure nothing. The 30-day measurement plan is short: Handle rate.
Of inbound contacts in the channel where AI is now answering, what percent did AI successfully complete versus escalate or drop. This is the deflection metric in chat language. Median minutes from first contact to whatever the business cares about: booked, ordered, refunded, qualified. Cost per completed interaction. All-in, including telephony, STT, TTS, LLM, observability, and your eval and ops time amortized.
How a 2M revenue service business should split 40K of AI budget across voice, chat, internal tools, and pilots. With the actual line items. It is filed under AI Strategy because that is where operators looking for this problem actually start, and it is written from production work rather than from a content calendar.