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Buying Company Brain with an exit plan
Short answer
When you buy a company assistant, agree up front what the team keeps after a change of supplier: the source documents, a description of the connections, the excluded materials with reasons and the agreed test questions with expected answers. A file export alone does not cover this. An AI application on company documents costs from €3,000 net at Syntalith. At 300 employee questions a month and 10 minutes of searching each, it pays back in 2.0 months.
How we workDetails ↓
- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- net per application, fixed price before contract
- from €3,000
- from signing the contract to acceptance
- 4–10 weeks
- free prototype on your documents
- €0
We belong to the OpenAI and Anthropic partner programmes and learn through their official courses. What this means ↓
Author: Syntalith · 3 min read
Statistics
Buying a company AI assistant: statistics 2026
2.0 mo.
payback of €3,000 at 300 employee questions a month: €1,745 of work today, €267 with checking and the model. Scenario.
49%
According to Anthropic (2024), combining contextual embeddings with BM25 search cut failed retrievals by 49%, and by 67% with reranking.
50%
According to the European Commission (2026), half of the small and medium-sized companies in the EU name high investment costs as a barrier to AI.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 578 (2026) ↗
48%
According to the European Commission (2026), 48% of small and medium-sized companies in the EU name a lack of expertise as a barrier to AI.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 578 (2026) ↗
52.7%
According to Eurostat (2025), 52.7% of EU companies paid for cloud computing services.
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
The library is there, the knowledge about the application is gone
A company uses an assistant for questions about organising events. When it changes contractor, it keeps the library of instructions, but has no record of which sources were connected and why old materials were excluded. The new team starts by reconstructing those decisions, and for several weeks employees get answers from old documents.
- The source documents and their description
- Connections to systems and their configuration
- Excluded materials with reasons
- Test questions with expected answers
- A decision on the chat history: who gets it and on what terms
A statement that „the data belongs to the client” does not tell you whether you will get a readable description of the sources and dependencies. Platform-specific parts, for example how search works and the configuration, may have to be rebuilt by the new contractor. The chat history may contain information about employees and clients, so it needs a separate decision.
What it costs and when it pays back
- Today
- 300 employee questions × 10 min = 50 h (€1,745)
- With the system, a person checks the result in 15% of the time
- €262
- Model, 1 call per case, Claude Sonnet 5.5
- €5
- Cost of one case
- €5.82 today, €0.89 with the system
- Saving
- €1,478 a month
Payback of €3,000
2.0 months
The volume, the time and the checking share are the scenario's assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat. Model: 6,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens per call at Anthropic's rates, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
The model is a small item here. The result depends on the time that searching and asking around take today, and on how much of it remains for checking the answer. An exit plan does not change the monthly cost, but it shortens the move to a new contractor. We count the team's time to rebuild the sources and rerun the test, which a good handover lets you avoid.
Before we price the build, we run a test on 20 to 100 questions the team has already asked: we compare the application's answer with what the employee found by hand, and we count the time from the question to the source. The test takes 5 working days and costs €0.
An export in your current tool is a start
Confluence documents exporting content to Word, PDF, HTML and XML, depending on the type of export. Check the export options and the scope of your own configuration in the current tool. A custom application also needs handover terms, because ordering it does not guarantee that the next contractor can take it over. Taking over a project from another contractor is covered in the post on changing your AI contractor.
A ready platform with export
checking the export and the configuration
within the licence
A custom application
code, a description of connections and test questions in the contract
from €3,000
A change of contractor mid-way
a review of the handover and a test on the questions
priced after a review
Where to start
Before you buy, ask the supplier to show what the handover looks like. The people responsible for the process name the application behaviour that matters, and IT assesses the technical dependencies.
For the first call, one question that keeps coming back to colleagues and where the team looks for the answer are enough. You do not need to send confidential documents, and you receive the written plan within 2 working days.
Worked example · Scenario
How we count the payback: answers from company documents
We run the same count for your documents in the free review.
€3,723
a month for finding answers to 800 questions in documents
Payback: 1 mo.
Our assumptions are 8 minutes to find an answer in documents or ask a colleague, and checking in 15% of the old time. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. Model cost: Claude Sonnet 5.5, about 6,000 + 500 tokens per answer from documents, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
See the full calculation →
