AI pricing has dropped significantly in the past six months. Tools that cost hundreds of dollars a month are now available for a fraction of that, and some are free with generous limits. For small businesses and nonprofits, this is the moment to stop waiting and start testing.
Here is the concrete thing you can do today: pick one repetitive task you do every week, whether that is drafting donor emails, answering customer questions, or summarizing meeting notes, and run it through a free tier of ChatGPT or Claude for two weeks. That is it. Do not overhaul anything. Just test one task.
Dr. Melody White has watched this pattern repeat across 30 years of IT consulting. Every time technology costs drop fast, the businesses that benefit most are not the ones who built the biggest strategy. They are the ones who ran a small, low-risk test first and learned something real. The businesses that waited for the perfect plan usually paid someone else to catch up later.
The risk right now is not that you will adopt AI too fast. It is that you will stay on the sidelines while your costs stay high and your competitors get faster.
If you want help figuring out which tasks are actually worth automating in your organization, that is exactly what we do at On Your Side Technologies.
Want to talk it through? We keep a few virtual coffee spots open each month — grab one while they’re available: Book a virtual coffee with Dr. White
