How to choose an AI model for your business (without wasting money)

Businesses rarely fail with AI because they picked the wrong model. They fail because they signed up for five services, spread keys across five dashboards, and lost track of what each one costs.

Match the model to the job

• Customer chat and summaries: a fast, inexpensive text model is enough
• Marketing images: an image model with strong text rendering
• Short promotional video: a video model with controllable duration and resolution
• Voice: text-to-speech for announcements, speech-to-text for call notes

Keep one dashboard

A single model desk — one place where every engine is listed, enabled or disabled, and monitored for usage — is worth more than a marginally better model. It is also the only way to control spend.

Rules worth setting early

• Keep API keys on the server, never in the browser
• Default the public site to safe content
• Log usage per engine so cost is visible
• Have one fallback engine configured, not four