Total cost of ownership
Also known as: TCO
What is total cost of ownership?
Total cost of ownership is the full lifetime cost of an AI system: implementation, model and infrastructure spend, integration upkeep, monitoring, retraining, and the internal time spent supervising it.
A useful rule of thumb from delivery work: ongoing annual cost commonly runs at 20–40% of the initial build for systems that touch live customer data. Budget for it or the system quietly degrades.
Last reviewed by the gAIcko editorial team.