Should a five-person New York office buy an AI tool, seats for everyone, or hire an intern?

The moment usually arrives without warning. An office of five people is drowning in quote requests, follow-up emails and admin, the owner has a budget that covers exactly one kind of help, and the choices do not line up neatly. A software tool has a fixed monthly bill but only does one thing. A subscription seat for each person spreads a general assistant across the team. An intern adds real hands and fresh eyes but needs training. None of these can be compared by price alone, because each one solves a different kind of work.

The way out is to sort the work first. This article walks through what each option actually does, who it fits, and how to run a one-afternoon test before spending the first real money.

Sort the work before comparing the cost

Pull out last week's task list and mark each repeating item with one of three labels. Label it software if it is the same task every time, with clear rules, such as cleaning up a spreadsheet or pulling data from PDFs. Label it judgment if it needs someone who understands the business, such as deciding what to quote a customer or how to handle a complaint. Label it hands if it simply needs more hours of a person, any trained person, such as chasing paperwork or making calls.

That label points at one option. Software-shaped work fits an AI tool. Judgment-shaped work fits a person who knows AI, or a trained member of the team. Hands-shaped work fits an intern. Cost only becomes the tiebreaker after the shape is right, and no public source publishes fixed dollar figures for these subscriptions, tools or intern pay in New York, so treat any number you see online as a guess and get the real price from the provider's own pricing page before comparing.

Option 1: Buy a single AI tool

An AI tool is a piece of software built for one job. An example of the type is TabAI, an AI analyst add-in for Excel listed on the Microsoft marketplace that cleans and reshapes data, converts PDFs into live tables, and automates import-to-memo workflows. Tools like this suit an office where one person's week is eaten by one specific repeating task with clear rules.

The fit is narrow by design. A tool does what it was built for, and it does not learn your business, handle exceptions or train anyone. Buy one when a single named task is the bottleneck and the whole office can route that task to one seat. The risk is shelfware: a monthly bill for software nobody opens after the first month, which the one-afternoon test below is designed to catch.

Option 2: Subscription seats for the whole team

A general AI assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude, paid directly to the provider by subscription, is usually all an owner needs to start. Giving every one of the five people a seat spreads a general helper across the office, and each person can use it on their own tasks, from drafting replies to summarizing documents.

Seats are the wrong first purchase when nobody has been shown how to use the assistant on real work. The subscription lands, the team keeps working the old way, and the bill keeps arriving. Most owners are better served by starting with one or two seats, learning real routines on them, and adding seats once the routines exist. The cost is whatever the provider charges, visible on their pricing page before you pay.

Option 3: Hire a college intern

An intern adds something none of the software options can: hands, presence and judgment that grows over a season. An intern can chase paperwork, make calls, sit in on meetings and take work off the whole team at once. For a five-person office, one capable intern can move the daily load in a way a single-purpose tool cannot.

The trade-off is that an intern needs onboarding, supervision and management time from people who are already stretched. An intern who arrives without clear tasks becomes a fifth wheel within a month. This option fits when the bottleneck is hours of trained-person work, not when it is the speed of one fixed task, and not when the real need is expertise nobody on the team has yet, such as knowing which AI to use for what.

Option 4: A person who does AI with you

There is a fourth path for owners who want a person rather than software. New York AI Lab, which works with owner-led New York businesses across the state on Zoom, offers an AI Concierge: one real person from its team who learns the business, holds two 1-hour working calls a month on real tasks, and answers voice messages and email between calls with no limit on questions. Everything built lives in the client's own accounts and is theirs to keep. It also runs AI Training for Business, hands-on sessions of 90 minutes and up, built on the team's approved real work, after which people leave with take-home routines, safe-use ground rules and a follow-up check-in. Its site states no public price; everything starts with a free 25-minute fit call on Zoom.

This option fits the judgment-shaped work that neither a tool nor an intern covers. It does not fit an office whose only bottleneck is a single fixed task, where a tool is cheaper and simpler. New York AI Lab does not guarantee savings or revenue; it picks useful work, measures what changed and reports honestly.

Run the one-afternoon test

Before spending the first real money, run a test that costs an afternoon and nothing else. It tells you which option the work actually wants.

One afternoon of this beats weeks of comparison shopping, because it replaces guesses with evidence from your own work. It also surfaces the fourth question: whether the office needs outside judgment it does not have in-house, which is the gap the person-based option fills.

What the person-based path looks like in numbers

For owners leaning toward the fourth option, the commitments are short and defined. Here is what the service actually involves, from New York AI Lab's own pages.

Questions owners ask first