AI licences in the enterprise: all four vendors charge about 20 euros per head. The real bill sits outside the price list

The short answer first: a business-grade AI subscription costs between about 20 and 21 euros or US dollars per user per month on annual billing, at every vendor that sells one. ChatGPT Business starts at 21 euros, Claude Team at 20 dollars, Microsoft 365 Copilot Business at 21 dollars as an add-on to the Microsoft plan underneath. Only Google breaks the pattern, because Gemini is already inside a package that starts at 6.80 euros. The price question is the easy part; the licence is roughly a fifth of what the decision actually costs.

What follows is priced against the vendors' own pages, all retrieved on 26 September 2026: OpenAI's business pricing, Anthropic's pricing, Google Workspace pricing and Microsoft's licence structure per Microsoft Learn and its Copilot pricing page.

The four price lists, read together

Three details in this table matter more than the numbers. First, the convergence: three independent vendors landed within one euro or dollar of each other, which means the market has decided what a seat of general-purpose AI is worth, and no procurement department will negotiate far from it. Second, the premium seat: both OpenAI and Anthropic sell a five-times-the-usage option at five times the price, aimed at the small share of staff who live inside the tool all day, and both allow mixing seats inside one workspace. Third, the architecture difference: Microsoft sells AI as a surcharge on software you already pay for, Google hides it in the price of the software itself, and OpenAI and Anthropic sell it as a destination of its own.

What the licence actually buys: the training exclusion

The least understood line in these price lists is not a number at all. In the business tiers, both OpenAI and Anthropic exclude training on customer content by default, and Google Workspace processes business data under its enterprise privacy commitment. That exclusion is the actual product being sold: it is the line between a tool that may see the quote draft, the personnel file and the contract, and one that may not.

The same line explains why the parallel private accounts are the real cost driver. A staff member running a privately billed Free or Pro account on company data is not saving twenty euros; they are declining exactly the protection the business licence exists to provide. The inventory of those accounts is a precondition for the licence decision, not a follow-up task, and it is what our piece on shadow AI in the enterprise lays out in detail.

The costs that sit in no price list

The subscription is the smallest of four blocks, and the other three are larger, less visible and partly mandatory.

• AI literacy is a statutory duty, not an onboarding nicety. Since 2 February 2025, Article 4 of the EU AI Act obliges providers and deployers to ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy of staff and other persons dealing with AI systems on their behalf. For a 25-person company that is a training programme, an acceptable-use policy and refreshers: budget it in days of work, not in euros, but budget it.
• Data hygiene decides whether the seat earns its money. An assistant connected to a chaotic drive answers chaotically. The connectors into SharePoint, Drive or Slack that every business tier advertises only pay off where the underlying filing is in order, which for most mid-sized companies is the actual project.
• Shadow AI runs in parallel until it is actively closed. The licence does not switch off the private accounts; a transition does. Until the sanctioned tool is the path of least resistance, the company pays for the licence and carries the risk of the private one at the same time.
• Administration is small but not zero. Seat management, SSO, spend controls and the quarterly question of who actually uses the seat fall on someone. At 25 seats it is a side task; at 200 it is a role.

The bill for 25 employees

Run the arithmetic once, because it reframes the decision. Twenty-five standard seats at roughly 20 euros land at about 500 to 550 euros a month, around 6,000 to 6,600 a year. Upgrading five power users to the 100-unit tier adds about 400 a month. That is less than a quarter of a working student, and it is why the licence itself is never the bottleneck. The same arithmetic run honestly adds the other blocks: two to three days of structured onboarding per person, one to two days of initial data hygiene per department, and a transition window of a quarter in which private accounts get closed deliberately. For most mid-sized companies the true first-year cost sits at three to five times the licence line, which is still a small number against the hours these tools actually save, but it is the number that decides whether the rollout succeeds or stalls after a pilot month.

The decision that matters more than the vendor

The choice follows the office suite, not the benchmark chart. A company that lives in Microsoft 365 buys Copilot as an add-on, because the value sits in having the assistant inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams rather than as a second destination. A company on Google Workspace has already paid for Gemini and should treat the question as an activation project, not a purchase. A standalone workspace subscription from a model vendor earns its place where work is model-native: research-heavy roles, agent workflows, or teams whose tools are neither suite. Companies that need AI inside their own systems rather than inside a chat window skip the licence question entirely and go to the API, where usage is billed per token; our Fable 5.1 migration piece carries the API price lines.

Two further caveats keep this honest. The add-on prices at Microsoft sit on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan, so the Copilot Business figure is a surcharge, not a total; the all-in bundle prices on Microsoft's business pages are the truer comparison. And every number above is a September 2026 snapshot of pages that change without ceremony: Anthropic's own history shows a model released with prices that were revised within weeks. Before signing, read the live price list, not this one.

Whoever takes one sentence from this piece: the licence is solved at twenty euros a head, and it is the wrong place to spend negotiating energy. What decides whether those seats pay back is literacy, filing and the deliberate shutdown of the private accounts that grew in the meantime. That sequence is also where a budget discussion belongs; our digital budget calculator puts the licence line into the total it actually sits in.

Frequently asked questions about AI licence costs