Which AI Model Should We Standardize On?
Decision framework for a 60‑person company

How We’ll Decide

  1. Identify business needs (content creation, data analysis, internal tools).
  2. Define evaluation criteria:
    • Capability (accuracy, reasoning, multilingual).
    • Cost (per‑token pricing & compute for self‑hosted).
    • Privacy & data‑security guarantees.
    • Ease of integration for a non‑technical team.
  3. Score leading models on each criterion.
  4. Weight criteria based on company priorities.
  5. Recommend the model with the highest weighted score.

Leading Models (April 2024)

Model Capability
(0‑10)
Cost
($/1M tokens)
Privacy Ease of Use
(0‑5)
OpenAI GPT‑4o 9.5 $5 (in) / $15 (out) Opt‑out data logging 5
Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet 9.0 $3 (in) / $15 (out) No data retention by default 5
Google Gemini Pro 8.5 $0.5 (in) / $1.5 (out) Retains for improvement (opt‑out limited) 4
Meta Llama 3.1 (8B/70B) 7.5 ~$0.2 compute per 1M tokens (self‑host) Fully controllable (on‑prem) 3 (requires infra)
Mistral Large 8.2 $2 (in) / $8 (out) Data not stored unless opted‑in 4
Cohere Command R+ 8.0 $5 (in) / $20 (out) Opt‑out possible, limited logging 4
Cost vs Capability 0 2 4 6 8 10 GPT‑4o: $5‑$15 Claude 3.5: $3‑$15 Gemini Pro: $0.5‑$1.5 Llama 3.1: $0.2 (compute) Mistral Large: $2‑$8

OpenAI GPT‑4o

Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Google Gemini Pro

Recommendation

Adopt Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet as the company‑wide standard model.

If a specific use‑case demands multimodal (image/audio) or the absolute highest performance, fallback to GPT‑4o for those projects.

Rollout Plan & Cost Estimate

  1. Month 1: Pilot with 5 power users (internal docs, summarization).
  2. Month 2‑3: Expand to all teams; build simple no‑code UI (Zapier‑style wrapper).
  3. Month 4: Governance – set up data‑usage policies, audit logs.
  4. Month 5‑6: Review usage, negotiate enterprise contract.

Assumed average usage: 2 M input tokens / month across the company.

Estimated monthly cost: ~$6,000 (Claude 3.5 pricing).

Additional budget: $3,000/quarter for tooling & training.

Risks & Mitigations

Summary

We evaluated six leading LLMs against capability, cost, privacy, and ease‑of‑use. Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet offers the optimal mix for a 60‑person organization seeking strong performance without sacrificing privacy or budget.

Next steps: approve pilot budget, assign a project lead, and start the Month 1 rollout.