I Built AI to Help Run a 100-Person Food Plant. Here's What It Costs (Real Numbers)

I built six AI workflows to help run a 100-person food and beverage plant, all on Microsoft Azure, and priced every one in US and Canadian dollars: 1. Morning Brief: a one-page summary for managers each morning 2. Hourly Line Checks: a Teams alert when a line drifts off target during a shift 3. QA Record Review: a check on every QA and sanitation record the moment it's saved 4. Approval Prep: purchase orders and time-off requests checked before a manager approves them 5. SOP Assistant: answers from the plant's own procedures 6. Meeting Follow-Up: action items from every meeting, plus a weekly list on Friday WORK WITH ME Want workflows like these built for your business? Start here: https://rivai.viralcoach.com/get-star... Reach me at support@riv-ai.com Which of these six would you want running first? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more breakdowns like this one. CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 0:38 Why Azure 1:28 The foundation: one resource group, three shared pieces 2:35 Workflow 1: Morning Brief 4:41 Workflow 2: Hourly Line Checks 5:57 Workflow 3: QA Record Review 7:22 Workflow 4: Approval Prep 8:28 Workflow 5: SOP Assistant 10:16 Workflow 6: Meeting Follow-Up 11:33 All six: the total and the locked-down cost 12:33 Wrap-up WHAT IT COSTS As built: about $19 USD a month ($26 CAD), and about $16 USD of that is the AI model. The SOP Assistant searches with Azure Cosmos DB for about 30 cents a month, instead of Azure AI Search at $74 USD. Fully locked down with private endpoints and a firewall: about $363 USD a month ($516 CAD). These are running costs only. Building it is extra. HOW I PRICED IT Prices are Azure list prices in USD from the Azure Retail Prices API for Canada Central (the AI model from Canada East), checked October 12, 2026, before discounts and tax. Canadian dollars use the Bank of Canada rate of October 13, 2026 (1.4222). All six workflows run on GPT-5.4 mini, with token counts estimated on the high side. THINGS I LEFT OUT OF THE VIDEO • Serverless: the Function App only runs when there's work, and you pay for what runs. The tradeoff is a cold start: the first request after a quiet stretch is slower. An always-on virtual machine avoids that but bills every hour. Flex Consumption's "always ready" option is the middle ground: about $6.57 USD a month for one 512 MB instance. • Your data: prompts and answers stay inside the company's own Azure account. Microsoft says they aren't available to OpenAI and aren't used to train models without your permission. Stored data stays in the country, but the model runs as a Global deployment, which can process prompts in any region where the model is deployed. I usually opt for US-only for both retention and processing. • Huddle transcription: Azure AI Speech fast transcription is $0.36 USD per audio hour. Batch transcription is half that, but at busy times a job can take up to 24 hours to finish. SOURCES • Azure Retail Prices API: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/res... • Bank of Canada exchange rates: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/exc... • Azure OpenAI pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pri... • Model retirements: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azu... • Azure OpenAI data privacy: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azu... • AI Search pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pri... • Cosmos DB serverless: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azu... • Cosmos DB vector search: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azu... • Functions pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pri... • Functions plans and cold starts: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azu... • Functions networking: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azu... • Speech pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pri... • Speech batch transcription: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azu... • Firewall pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pri... • Private Link pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pri... #Azure #AI #Automation