A useful 2027 AI budget for a small marketing team should be boring enough for finance to approve and specific enough for the team to use. List named seats, a controlled usage pool, training time and an owner. Do not submit a single hopeful line called AI tools.
For a team of two to eight, the biggest waste is usually duplication. People buy several general assistants, a separate writing product and a design upgrade, then use one of them every day. Budget from actual weekly work, not feature lists.
Start with one primary assistant per person
Choose one general assistant as the team standard. Add a second only for a documented use case that the first cannot handle well enough. Shared administration, common instructions and one place for approved workflows are worth more than having every model available.
Current list prices give you a clean planning range. ChatGPT Business lists a Standard seat at USD20 per month with annual billing or USD25 monthly. It requires at least two paid seats. Claude Team lists the same USD20 annual or USD25 monthly rate for a Standard seat, also with a two-member minimum.
Both vendors also sell a higher-usage seat well above the standard rate. Do not hand those out by default. Assign them to people who can show regular limit pressure tied to real work, and read the current price off the vendor page on the day you build the table.
Check what your existing suite already includes
Many teams already pay for AI inside software they need for other reasons. The current Google Workspace pricing page lists Business Starter at USD7 and Business Standard at USD14 per user per month with a one-year commitment. Both tiers list Gemini features as part of the plan. Check what your team already pays for before you buy a separate assistant seat.
Canva has changed its team offer. Its current pricing page lists Canva Business at USD250 per person per year. Check your existing Canva contract before you move anything. Renewal terms for current subscribers are not always the public price.
These pages display USD, so keep the finance request in USD and note that tax, regional billing and card conversion may change the final charge. Do not invent an SGD conversion months before renewal.
Separate seats from usage
A seat buys predictable access for a person. Usage pays for work done through an API, automated workflow or extra capacity. Put them on different budget lines. Seats belong to named roles. Usage needs a monthly cap, an owner and a reason it exists.
A sensible request might say: six standard assistant seats for daily research and drafting, one premium seat for the heaviest operator, and a capped monthly usage pool for two approved automations. Add a small training allocation and quarterly review time. The exact quantities should come from your team, not this example.
Do not hide experimental usage inside software subscriptions. Finance cannot tell whether spend is controlled, and the team cannot tell whether an automation costs more than the manual task it replaced.
For each usage line, estimate a normal month and a maximum month. Add an alert below the maximum, not after it. The owner should review cost beside completed work, failed runs and manual corrections. Cheap tokens can still fund an expensive process if people spend hours repairing the output.
Cut duplication before asking for growth
Cut dormant seats first. Then remove overlapping writing tools, personal subscriptions that bypass team controls, and premium tiers bought for occasional bursts. Pause any automation that has no owner, no usage ceiling or no output review.
Our view is that a lean team should earn tool variety. Keep a second assistant or specialist product only when it produces a repeatable gain that someone can explain in one sentence. Novelty is not a budget category.
Phrase the finance request around control
Write the ask in finance language: purpose, headcount, unit cost, billing term, maximum exposure, owner and review date. State which subscriptions you are cancelling and where the offset appears. Include a short success test, such as weekly active use and two approved workflows completed each month.
Send finance a one-page table before Q4 planning closes. Use current vendor prices, mark every renewal date and commit to a January access review. That gives the team room to work without turning the budget into an open tab.