Small companies in Europe rarely fail because the owner cannot write an email. They lose evenings to the same email, written forty times. That is the kind of work AI handles well: repetitive, text-based, low-risk, easy to check in ten seconds.
Below are five tasks worth handing over now, what each costs in euros, and the limits that actually matter if you trade inside the EU. The prices are published list prices, converted where needed, with VAT added where the provider charges it to EU customers. Providers change them, so confirm before you commit.
1. Routine email and customer replies
A paid chat assistant is the cheapest place to start. ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro both list at $20 a month, which lands somewhere between €20 and €23 depending on VAT and the exchange rate. Google's paid tier sits around €22 a month in the eurozone. The French provider Mistral sells Le Chat Pro for roughly €15.
All four work across the EU and handle German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Czech. The smaller the language, the more carefully you read the output.
What it is good at: turning three rough lines into a polite reply, squeezing a forty-message thread into five bullets, rewriting the answer you should not send as written.
What it is bad at: facts. Left alone, an assistant will invent a delivery date, a discount or a part number without hesitating. Put the real details in the prompt and keep the rule that nothing leaves the outbox unchecked.
The free tiers are fine for public text such as a job advert or a product description. They are the wrong place for a customer's address or complaint, because consumer plans usually reserve the right to use your conversations for training. The business plans cost more and come with a data processing agreement, which you need under Article 28 of the GDPR.
2. Meeting and phone-call notes
This is the task with the clearest price. OpenAI's transcription endpoint lists at $0.006 per minute, so an hour-long recording costs $0.36, roughly thirty euro cents. A year of weekly supplier calls comes to under €20.
The free option is Whisper, the open-source model, running on your own laptop. It is slower and needs a reasonably modern machine, but the audio never leaves your office. For a business handling personal data, that is the strongest position you can take under GDPR.
Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom already transcribe calls inside their paid plans, so check what you are paying for before buying anything new.
The catch is legal, not technical. Recording a conversation with a customer or an employee needs a lawful basis and, in several EU countries, prior notice. Germany treats secret recordings of private conversations harshly. Say at the start of the call that you are recording, and note it in the file.
3. Turning paperwork into quotes and invoices
Most EU accounting subscriptions now include some form of receipt capture: Fakturoid and iDoklad in Czechia, sevDesk and Lexoffice in Germany, Xero and QuickBooks across the single market. Prices for a sole trader usually start around €10 a month and climb with invoice volume; a small firm with several staff typically pays €25 to €40.
If you only handle a handful of receipts a week, a chat assistant with a paid plan can read a photographed invoice and return the line items as a table. It works. It is not a bookkeeping system, and it will make mistakes on scanned copies.
Do not let it guess VAT. Rates differ across the EU and several countries have changed them in the last two years. An extraction tool that quietly assigns the wrong rate creates work for your accountant that costs more than the tool saves. Check the classification yourself, or leave that field to the software that already knows your country's rules.
4. Translating for a neighbouring market
DeepL Pro starts at about €9 a month on annual billing for a single user. The free tier translates short passages only and is not usable for a price list. DeepL is a German company and says text sent through Pro is not used to train its models and is deleted after translation, which is a cleaner answer than most.
Use it for product descriptions, standard email templates, terms pages and the website. For anything with legal weight, a contract or a warranty statement, pay a native speaker to read the result. Machine translation of a liability clause is not a saving.
Chat assistants are competitive for tone, especially when you need the same message to sound friendly in Dutch and formal in French. DeepL tends to win on plain accuracy for technical wording.
5. Product photos and social posts
Canva Pro runs about €12 a month or roughly €110 a year and bundles background removal, layout templates and a set of AI tools. For a business that posts twice a week, that is usually enough.
Generative image tools are useful for backgrounds, seasonal graphics and mock-ups. They are a poor substitute for a photo of the actual item you are selling. Customers notice, and in the EU they have grounds to complain: the Omnibus Directive tightened rules on misleading commercial practices, and a rendered product that does not match what arrives is exactly that.
One more date to note. From 2 August 2026, the AI Act requires synthetic images, audio and video to be marked, and anyone publishing a deep fake has to say so. If you plan to use generated images in advertising, build the disclosure into your workflow now rather than retrofitting it.
What a realistic monthly bill looks like
| Task | Example tool | Typical cost | Available in the EU |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email and drafting | ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Google AI Pro, Le Chat Pro | €15 to €23 per user / month | Yes, all four |
| Transcription | OpenAI API or local Whisper | €0.30 per hour of audio, or free locally | Yes |
| Invoices and receipts | Your existing accounting subscription | €10 to €40 per month | Yes, country-specific tools |
| Translation | DeepL Pro Starter | about €9 per month, annual billing | Yes, German provider |
| Images and social posts | Canva Pro | about €12 per month or €110 per year | Yes |
Add it up for a one-person business: roughly €40 to €90 a month if you take one tool per task. That is less than a day of a part-time assistant, and it buys back several evenings a month. Start with one line of the table, not five.
What GDPR and the AI Act ask of you
If you paste a customer's name, address or complaint into a chatbot, you are the data controller and the provider is your processor. Three things follow.
You need a data processing agreement with the provider. Business plans offer one; consumer plans usually do not. You need a lawful basis for processing the data, which for ordinary correspondence is normally legitimate interest or the performance of a contract. And you need to know where the data goes. Several providers now offer EU data residency on business plans, Microsoft publishes an EU Data Boundary, and OpenAI offers European storage for API and enterprise customers. Ask the question before you sign.
The AI Act has applied since 1 August 2024 and reaches small businesses in stages. The AI literacy duty under Article 4 has been in force since 2 February 2025: anyone using AI in a professional context should understand what the tool does and where it fails. In practice that is a one-page briefing for staff, not a compliance department.
Two areas need more care than a chatbot does. Recruitment is listed as high-risk in Annex III of the Act, so screening CVs with an AI tool puts you in a category with real obligations. And from 2 August 2026 you have to tell people when they are interacting with an AI system rather than a person, which covers the chat widget on your website.
If you want to see how the models compare on ordinary office tasks before you pay for one, our AI Arena benchmark results are a decent starting point. And if the real problem is that nobody on the team knows what the tools can do, a short course beats another subscription.
Do I have to tell customers that I use AI?
Not for drafting an email in your own name. You do have to be transparent when a customer is talking to a chatbot instead of a person, and from 2 August 2026 the AI Act makes that explicit. GDPR already requires you to explain automated processing in your privacy notice if it affects a decision about someone.
Can my staff use the free versions on their own accounts?
For public text, yes. For anything containing customer data, no. Free consumer accounts usually reserve training rights over what you type and come without a processing agreement, so you would be handing personal data to a provider with no contractual cover. One paid business seat for the team is cheaper than sorting that out later.
What if the AI gets an invoice or a price wrong?
The responsibility stays with you. No EU rule shifts liability to the tool for an error in a quote or an invoice you sent. Check the first few dozen outputs carefully, then spot-check. Treat every number the system produces as a draft until a person has looked at it.
