We become your IT department and own the day-to-day.
›Managed IT Your whole environment, owned ›Managed Devices Endpoints, patched & tracked ›Microsoft 365 The workplace, managed ›Cloud & Azure Run properly, costs watched ›Connectivity Internet & networks that work ›Business VoIP Phones on any deviceSecurity operations you can verify, and show.
›24-Hour CyberSOC Security ops that don't clock off ›Identity & Access MFA enforced, takeover stopped ›Email Security Phishing & fraud, stopped ›Endpoint Protection EDR on every device ›Backup & Recovery Provably restorable ›Security Bundles Per-user, no hidden feesHonest strategy, budgets you can plan around.
›IT Advisory & vCIO Honest, predictable plans ›Compliance & Governance Audit-ready evidence ›Projects & Consulting Build what you can't buy ›Procurement Right kit, fair price, visible ›Licensing Right-sized, never wasted ›IT Asset Finance Spread the cost, monthly ›Data Centres & Hosting Sovereign, servers in minutesAI, automation and software, where they genuinely help.
›AI at Belton All four phases, and the prices ›AI Readiness What is safe to turn on, from $1,499 ›AI Training Copilot, Claude & ChatGPT, from $299 ›Monthly AI Plans Managed & improving, from $1,495/mo ›AI Projects Bootcamp & custom builds, from $15k ›Business Automation Hand work to the platform ›Software Development Custom builds, done properly ›Client Portal AI-first insights & budgets ›White-Label / Partners Our bench, your brandOrganisations that run on trust, time and confidential data.
›Accounting Ledgers & client data ›Legal Privilege & matter files ›Government & Councils OIA, LGOIMA & records ›Business Advisory Plans & reporting ›Mortgage & Finance Loan files & AML/CFT ›Insurance Claims & client records ›Insurance Brokers Cover & premiumsSite, studio and floor, where uptime is the product.
›Construction Sites & project files ›Architecture Drawings & large models ›Quantity Surveyors Cost data & big files ›Manufacturing Floor & ERP uptime ›Healthcare Patient data & privacyFast-moving operations that can't carry downtime.
›Logistics Fleet, orders & tracking ›Retail & Wholesale POS & storefronts ›Hospitality POS, EFTPOS & guest WiFi ›Technology Cloud-native teams ›Distribution Inventory & systems ›Franchise Every location, one platform ›Global Operations Offices across time zones ›General SMB Don't fit a box? Start herePlain-English playbooks for the controls that matter.
›Essential Eight ASD's eight, explained ›DIY Cybersecurity Lock down the basics ›Cyber Standards Guide ISO, SMB1001 & more ›M365 Selection Guide Pick the right licencesSelf-serve checks that map where you stand.
›Security Assessment Score your posture ›Network Assessment Find the weak spots ›M365 Security Checklist Find the gaps ›Cyber Insurance Readiness Be claim-readyGet more from the tools you already pay for.
›SME Tech Outlook 2026 Where NZ tech heads next ›Copilot Learning Hands-on with Copilot ›FAQ Straight answers ›CEO's Blog Plain-English viewsA senior team with the skills and scale for any project.
›About Belton Who we are, plainly ›How We Work Our delivery process ›Who We Work With The fit we look for ›Leadership Jason & Amy Agnew + teamThe evidence behind the claims, and ways to build with us.
›Case Studies Real outcomes, named ›Accreditations The proof behind the practice ›Industries Sector-specialised ›White-label / Partners Our bench, your brandReal people, fast, no ticket-queue runaround.
›Contact Us Talk to a human, today ›Book a Session A 90-minute discovery ›Find Us Newmarket, Auckland ›Remote Support Get help nowAn agent is not a chatbot with ambition. It is a piece of software that does a job you would otherwise pay a person to do, hands the work back finished, and waits to be told whether it got it right. This page is twenty-four of them worth building, what each one has to reach, what the platforms actually charge, and the honest answer on hosting it yourself. Prices for other people's products are theirs, not ours, and we have printed the date we checked them.
The word has been stretched to cover almost anything with a model behind it. The distinction matters because the three cost different amounts, fail in different ways, and answer to different people in your business.
Waits to be asked, answers, forgets. Copilot in your Outlook is an assistant. It is genuinely useful and it is priced per seat, because the value scales with how many people are sitting there asking.
Fires on a trigger and does exactly the same thing every time. Enormously valuable, far cheaper, and the right answer more often than anyone selling agents will tell you. If the rules never change, you want an automation.
Given an outcome rather than a script, it works out the steps, uses the systems it has been given, and comes back with the work done and its reasoning shown. You want one when the job needs judgement in the middle, and the judgement is the expensive part.
These are not hypotheticals. Each one exists because the manual version of it is already happening somewhere, badly, in a spreadsheet. Size is relative rather than a quoted duration, because the real number is fixed at scoping and not before it.
Reads every supplier invoice as it arrives, proposes the account code and cost centre, and puts it in front of a person to approve.
Drafts the follow-up on every overdue invoice, in your tone, ranked by what is worth chasing first rather than by what is oldest.
Takes the transactions nobody can place and searches two years of history for the ones that looked like them, with the reasoning shown.
Compares what each job was quoted at against what it actually cost to deliver, and tells you which kinds of work quietly lose money.
Turns a photographed, scanned or handwritten job sheet into a structured record, and asks a human about anything it could not read.
Reads supplier price lists as they land, flags exactly what changed, and works out what the change does to your margin before you find out at invoicing.
Reads carrier and supplier notifications, and separates the ones a customer genuinely needs to hear about from the noise.
Drafts a written procedure from a recording of someone actually doing the task, then re-checks it each quarter and flags the steps that no longer match reality.
Reads every inbound enquiry, works out who the company is, and drafts both the reply and the suggested next step before anyone has opened it.
Assembles a first draft from your own previous proposals and the notes from the call, so the blank page stops being the reason quotes go out late.
Finds the duplicates, the records owned by someone who left, and the opportunities that have not moved in a year, and proposes the fix for each.
Reads the tender, maps every requirement to the evidence you already hold, and tells you plainly which ones you cannot currently answer.
Turns a start date into the whole checklist, raises the requests across every system, and chases the ones nobody has done by Friday.
Answers staff questions from your actual policies, quotes the clause it used, and says so plainly when the policy does not cover the question.
Flags the timesheets that do not look like the person’s normal pattern, before payroll rather than after it.
Turns everyone’s scattered interview notes into the same scorecard, so candidates are actually compared on the same things.
Takes a security alert, gathers the context from every other system that saw the same device or account, and writes the short summary of what it actually is.
Lists who can currently reach what, and flags the access that does not match the job the person actually does.
Compares what you are billed for against what is actually assigned, and what is assigned against what anyone has used this quarter.
Compares what you are being billed for against what is actually documented, and surfaces the things running in your business that nobody has written down.
Reads the contracts you already signed and pulls the dates, notice periods, liability caps and auto-renewals into one register you can actually search.
Tells you a notice period is closing while you still have time to do something about it, rather than the week it renews.
Works out where one person’s data actually lives across your systems, so a privacy request is a task rather than a fortnight.
Assembles a defensible chronology from logs, tickets and email when something has gone wrong and the question is what happened when.
Nothing in that group yet. Choose another, or tell us the job you actually have.
Every price in this section belongs to the vendor, not to us. They move without notice, and one of them moved during the week this page was written. Two of them are shown exactly as the vendor publishes them in New Zealand dollars. The rest are billed in US dollars and converted here at NZ$1.69 to the US dollar as at 28 August 2026, which means those ones drift with the exchange rate and the card is still charged in USD. Each card says which it is. Check the vendor's own page before you commit to a number.
Agents that live where your people already are, inside Teams and Microsoft 365, working on your SharePoint and Graph data with the identity and permissions you already run.
You are billed per credit, so a popular agent gets expensive quietly rather than loudly. What it can reach is bounded by what the connectors expose, and that boundary is where most projects meet their surprise.
Helping individual people inside the apps they already have open. It is the per-seat assistant layer across Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams.
It is an assistant, not an agent platform. It waits to be asked. If you want something that runs on its own and hands work back finished, this is the wrong line item.
Work that is thinking rather than formatting: long documents read properly, analysis that holds up, and processes built once and reused. It is not tied to one software suite, which is why it handles the jobs that do not fit inside an app.
It is not natively wired into your tenancy the way a Microsoft product is, so connecting it to your systems is real integration work rather than a checkbox. Billed in USD, so your actual cost moves with the exchange rate.
An agent you own outright, that runs on your schedule against your systems, with no seat count and no dependence on what a product happens to expose.
Usage priced, so the bill follows the work rather than the headcount. That is honest but it needs a budget and a ceiling set deliberately at build time.
Broad general capability with the widest staff familiarity, which lowers the training cost of getting a team started.
Enterprise is quote only and carries a large seat minimum, so the entry point is a procurement exercise rather than a subscription.
The plumbing. Moving work between systems on a trigger, with the steps visible on a canvas that a non-developer can actually follow and audit.
It orchestrates, it does not think. It is the frame you hang a model on, and the cloud tiers are priced by execution volume, which climbs faster than people expect.
The genuine constraint cases: data that is not permitted to leave your control, a regulator who wants a straight answer about residency, or volume large enough that per-token pricing stops making sense.
The hardware is the small number. Published analyses put the maintenance at 10 to 20 engineering hours a month, and below roughly 2 million tokens a day an API is usually cheaper than the box, before anyone is paid to look after it.
| Model | In | Out | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5 | $8.45 | $42.25 | The hard reasoning. Worth it when being right matters more than the unit cost. |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $3.38 | $16.90 | The everyday workhorse. Most production agents should start here. |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.69 | $8.45 | High volume, low judgement. Classifying, routing, extracting. |
A token is roughly three quarters of a word, counted both going in and coming out. The practical read: an agent that reads a hundred long documents a day costs money you will notice, and one that answers forty short questions a day usually does not. The number that matters is not the rate, it is how much you send it, and that is a design decision made at build time rather than a surprise found at invoicing.
Most agent quotes fail because they price the build and go quiet about the running cost. There are three separate layers here and they behave differently. We itemise all three at scoping, including the ones that are not ours to charge for.
Paid to Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI or whoever else, mostly monthly and mostly per seat. Predictable, and the easiest layer to over-buy. Microsoft bills this in New Zealand dollars; most of the others bill in US dollars, so that part of the bill moves with the exchange rate. We will tell you when you are paying for seats nobody is using.
The one that varies, because it follows how hard the agent is actually working. This is the layer people are surprised by, so it gets a ceiling set at build time and a monthly figure you can see rather than infer.
Ours, and the only layer on this page we set. Fixed in writing before we build. If you want it looked after afterwards that is a monthly plan, priced separately and openly.
| What | Price | Basis | |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI readiness assessment | $1,499 | from, one off | Details › |
| Build session, 4 hours | $1,889 | per person | Details › |
| Monthly AI plan | $1,495 | from, per month | Details › |
| AI bootcamp, 3 days | $15,000 | fixed | Details › |
| A scoped custom build | $15k to $250k+ | fixed at scoping | Details › |
| Uplift work, hourly | $269 | per hour | Details › |
Every figure on this page is in New Zealand dollars. Third-party prices were checked in August 2026: Microsoft’s are its own published NZ list prices, and the rest are converted from USD at NZ$1.69 as at 28 August 2026, so those move with the exchange rate and are still charged to you in USD. Our own prices exclude GST. Usage-based lines vary with how much work the agent does, which is the honest position rather than a flat number that would have to be padded to be safe.
Not the most impressive job, the most repetitive one with a clear right answer. If nobody can describe what a good outcome looks like, an agent cannot either, and that is a finding worth having before you spend anything.
You, in an afternoonAn agent inherits the permissions of whoever runs it, which means an over-shared SharePoint becomes an over-sharing agent on day one. The permissions problems that trip up Copilot trip up everything else pointed at the same files.
Readiness assessmentOne job, one data source, one person using it. The point is to find out where the real difficulty is, which is almost never where it looked from the outside.
Build session or plan monthThe agent proposes, a person approves, and the system records who approved what. This is the difference between an agent you can defend in an audit and one you quietly turn off after an incident.
Designed in, not bolted onSomething built and then orphaned is worse than nothing, because people start relying on it. Name the owner before you build, and be honest if the answer is that nobody has the time.
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If you already know the job and just want a straight answer on whether it is worth building, this is the shorter road. Two fields and the idea. We will come back with a yes, a no, or the cheaper thing you should do instead. No obligation and no sequence of follow-up emails.
It depends almost entirely on how much you send it, not on which vendor you picked. A small internal agent answering a few dozen questions a day generally sits low enough that the platform seat is the bigger line. One reading long documents all day is the opposite, and the usage becomes the main cost. That is why the running figure is worked out at scoping and given to you as a monthly number with a ceiling, rather than left to be discovered on an invoice.
If the work lives inside Microsoft 365 and the agent mostly needs your SharePoint, Teams and Graph data with the permissions you already run, Copilot Studio is the shorter path. If the work is reading and reasoning over long material, or it does not fit inside one suite, Claude usually handles it better. Plenty of businesses end up with both, and the deciding question is where your data already lives rather than which model reviews better.
On business and enterprise tiers, generally not by default, and that is one of the real reasons to move a team off personal accounts onto a business plan. The important part is that this is a contractual question with a written answer per vendor and per tier, so it belongs in the scoping document rather than in a reassurance. We will show you the terms rather than summarise them.
If the agent will touch your document estate or Microsoft 365 data, usually yes. An agent inherits the permissions of whoever runs it, so existing over-sharing becomes visible the moment you point something at it. If the agent only touches one tightly held system, it often does not apply. Readiness is the cheaper thing to find out first either way.
No, and that is deliberate. General support agreements, whether per user, per device or per site, exclude AI tooling, agents and automations. AI work sits under an AI plan or is billed as time. The reason is honesty about cost: absorbing AI support into a plan that was never priced for it hides a growing bill inside a line item you thought you understood.
Models are replaced regularly and the good ones behave slightly differently when they are. An agent built as a single enormous instruction tends to break quietly at that point. Built properly, with the job broken into checkable steps, moving to a newer model is a test run rather than a rebuild. If we build it, that is our problem to manage on a plan. If your team builds it, it is one of the things the bootcamp exists to teach.
Yes, and for a lot of businesses that is the better answer. The three day bootcamp exists precisely to leave the capability with your people rather than with us, and the ideas on this page are a reasonable backlog to walk in with. If you would rather own the outcome than the skill, a scoped build is the shorter road.
The businesses getting value out of agents did not start with a strategy. They started with one annoying, repetitive job and a person who was glad to see the back of it.
We do the switch: your current provider, the migration, the handover, all of it. Most teams barely notice the cutover happened.
On the right plan, compliance, reporting and budgets are handled inside the partnership. You run the business; we run the IT underneath it.
Quarterly business reviews are generated automatically from your live environment: spend, posture, recommendations and roadmap, ready for the board, reviewed with your account manager.
The honest bit: the full looked-after experience comes with the right plan. We charge fairly for what we take on, and when costs step up it's because you are taking on more, always moving in the right direction.
Sovereign data centres across New Zealand and Australia, with your data kept onshore wherever it's required. Our team understands New Zealand, and our leaders have built, scaled and secured businesses right across the New Zealand landscape.
Microsoft Solutions Partner in both Modern Work and Security: the two designations covering the platform your business runs on and the security that protects it.
