Manufacturing operations leader. Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Builder of the tool I wished existed when vendors quoted $200K for projects that ended up costing $800K.
I've spent the last 8+ years on production floors — food and CPG plants where a bad number on a spreadsheet shows up as scrap, downtime, or a missed shipment. I've led operations teams, run Lean Six Sigma projects, and built data pipelines and analytics systems that manufacturing leaders actually use to make decisions.
Along the way I sat through too many AI vendor pitches. Pitches that were technically honest but commercially misleading — a $200K quote that only covered the model, not the data preparation, the OT/IT convergence, the integration with the MES, the change management on the floor, or the 3 years of maintenance. The vendors weren't lying. They just weren't scoping the real project.
Watching enough of those projects ship late, over budget, or quietly die in the pilot phase — that's what produced True AI Cost. An independent, research-backed calculator with no vendor commissions or referral fees, built so buyers walk into the conversation knowing what the real number looks like.
Every number on this site is cross-validated against at least two independent sources — RAND's 2024 research on AI project failure, S&P Global Market Intelligence's 2025 enterprise survey, Gartner and McKinsey benchmarks, Stanford HAI's AI Index, and peer-reviewed literature on industrial AI deployment. I don't accept vendor-supplied "ROI case studies" as inputs, because those case studies are selection-biased and typically exclude the projects that failed.
Where our ranges are wide, it's because the underlying data is genuinely wide. I'd rather give you an honest range you can plan against than a point estimate that looks precise and misleads you. The calculator's 3-year TCO ranges are calibrated against ~1,000 documented implementations.
Most AI cost tools are built by vendors, consultancies, or CSPs who have a commercial interest in your implementation going forward. True AI Cost has none of those incentives. We don't sell software, we don't resell models, and we don't get referral fees from any vendor on this site. That's deliberate. The tool is useful precisely because the incentives are clean.
I also run Crusoe Advisory, a small operations-intelligence consultancy focused on OEE, plant-floor analytics, and AI feasibility work. If after running the calculator you'd like a second set of eyes on your project, that's where that conversation happens — but the calculator itself is free, complete, and independent of that engagement.
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