What AI really costs a professional services firm.
At AssumeAI's published prices, a UK professional services firm can start paid AI work from £3,000, put one working AI solution live for from £6,000, and take a first year from a plan to several working systems for roughly £10,000 to £35,000, plus software licences. Independent contract data puts the median UK AI consultant at £552 a day. This guide shows where the money goes, what each kind of engagement buys, and how to check a quote.
- Median UK AI consultant day rate, six months to 21 Oct 2026
- £552
- Our lightest paid engagement: AI governance implementation, from
- £3,000
- One AI solution live in a 30-day sprint, from
- £6,000
- Enterprise AI Deployment, the whole price, ex VAT
- £20,000
Firms we have built with
What makes up the cost of AI in a firm?
Most articles about AI cost answer a narrower question: what an AI consultant charges by the day. That is one line in the budget. A firm that wants AI to change how it wins and delivers work pays for four things, and the consultant's fee is often not the largest of them over a few years. This guide is about that whole budget; our own price for each service is on our pricing page.
Advice
Advice: working out where your hours go, which opportunities are worth the money and in what order, and what governance you need before anyone touches client data. This is a strategy review, a prioritisation workshop or a governance project, and it is usually a fixed fee.
Building
Building: turning a chosen workflow into a system that runs, connected to the tools you already use, tested by the people who will use it and handed over with documentation. This is where the bulk of a first-year budget goes.
Licences and hosting
Licences and hosting: the per-user subscriptions for platforms such as Microsoft Copilot, Claude or ChatGPT, and the hosting for anything built for you. These carry on after the project ends, so they matter more than their monthly size suggests.
Your people's time
Your people's time: survey answers and interviews during a review, testing during a build, and training afterwards. It never appears on an invoice, and it is the cost firms most often forget to plan for.
What do AI consultants charge in the UK?
The only independent measure of UK day rates we know of is the contract market. IT Jobs Watch, which tracks UK job adverts, gave a median day rate of £552 for AI consultant contracts in the six months to 21 October 2026, from 72 quoted rates. The tenth percentile was £428 and the ninetieth £710. AI engineer contracts had a median of £600 a day over the same period.
Treat those as a floor, not a price list. They describe individual contractors placed on defined assignments, usually inside a larger team that already knows what it is building. A consultancy that diagnoses your business, designs the work and carries the risk of delivering it is selling something different, and usually prices it by the project rather than by the day. Figures much higher than the contract range circulate widely online, but most come from providers' own marketing and few say where they come from.
The more useful question is who carries the risk. With a day rate, a project that runs long costs you more. With a fixed fee, it costs the consultant. For a defined outcome, a fixed fee or at least a capped one is normally the better deal for the buyer. A day rate suits open-ended advice where the scope genuinely cannot be fixed. We look at day rates, and how to read them, in more depth in our post on AI consultant cost in the UK.
What does AssumeAI charge for each kind of AI work?
We publish a price for every service, because a buyer comparing quotes deserves a fixed point to compare against. Each is a starting price for a defined piece of work with a published timeline, apart from Enterprise AI Deployment, which is £20,000 excluding VAT: that is the price, not a starting point. Our pricing page lists every service with what it includes, its timeline and its guarantee.
The pattern in the table is worth noticing whoever you buy from. The price follows how much of your business has to be understood and changed, not how much technology is installed. Tools are cheap. Working out which process is worth changing, building it properly and getting people to use it is where the cost sits.
Each service carries a guarantee. If the AI Strategy Review does not surface opportunities worth many times the fee, we keep working until it does. If a 30-day sprint is not live and delivering value in 30 days, we keep working at no extra cost until it is. If you are not happy with an Enterprise AI Deployment for any reason, we refund you in full. Ask any provider, us included, what happens when the work falls short; the answer tells you more than the day rate.
| Service | Investment |
|---|---|
| AI Priorities WorkshopTwo pain point workshops and a concise roadmapTwo workshops, plus a roadmap | From £4,000 |
| AI Strategy ReviewSurveys, interviews, a tech stack review and five documentsAbout six weeks | From £12,000 |
| AI Governance ImplementationPolicies, impact assessments and audit trails2 to 4 weeks | From £3,000 |
| Tailored AI Team TrainingWorkshops across Claude, Cowork, Gemini and moreOne-off or a sustained programme | From £5,000 |
| 30-Day Implementation SprintOne use case, built and deployedAbout four weeks | From £6,000 |
| 90-Day Implementation SprintSeveral workflows built, deployed and embeddedAbout twelve weeks | From £15,000 |
| Enterprise AI DeploymentClaude Cowork or ChatGPT Enterprise, with six to twelve agents and skillsAgreed when scoped | £20,000 ex VAT |
| Managed ServiceHalf, one or two engineers embedded in your firmMonthly | From £5,500 per month |
What would a first year of AI cost at our prices?
Three common routes, priced from our published starting prices. They are illustrations to help you size a budget, not quotes: the real number depends on what you need, and we will not quote a build before we know where your hours go.
Start small, prove it works
From about £10,000. A boutique firm with one obvious bottleneck takes the free AI maturity assessment, then the AI Priorities Workshop from £4,000 to agree what to tackle first, then a 30-day implementation sprint from £6,000 to put one working solution live. That is from £10,000, with the roadmap and the system yours to keep.
Plan first, then build
From about £35,000. A firm that wants an evidence-based plan before it spends takes the AI Strategy Review from £12,000, AI governance implementation from £3,000, tailored AI team training from £5,000 and a 90-day implementation sprint from £15,000 to build, deploy and embed several workflows. That is from £35,000 over the year.
One platform for everyone
From about £28,000, plus licences. A firm of 20 to 200 people that wants everyone on one secure platform takes AI governance implementation from £3,000, Enterprise AI Deployment at £20,000 excluding VAT, with Claude Cowork or ChatGPT Enterprise and six to twelve agents and skills built around its real workflows, and training from £5,000. The platform licences are billed by the vendor on top.
What does AI cost to run once it is built?
The running costs are mostly licences, and they are charged per user per month, so they scale with headcount. As two examples checked on 21 October 2026: Microsoft lists its Microsoft 365 Copilot Business add-on at £16.10 per user per month on annual billing, excluding VAT, with a first-year discount to £13.80 for eligible purchases made by 31 December 2026, and notes usage-based billing for some advanced features. Anthropic lists Claude Team standard seats at $20 per seat per month billed annually, or $25 monthly. For fifty people on the Copilot add-on at list price, that is £9,660 a year.
Anything built for you also needs hosting, and the cost depends on how heavily it is used, so ask for an estimate in the quote rather than after the build. Because we build inside your existing infrastructure and you own everything, code included, those costs sit in your accounts, not ours, and you can see them.
Then someone has to look after what was built. Some firms train their own people to do it, which is why our builds end with a handover, documentation and training for the team who will run them. Others keep building capacity on tap through our managed service: half an engineer from £5,500 a month, one engineer from £8,500 or two from £15,000, on a monthly footing you can change or stop.
Is it cheaper to hire an AI engineer than to buy one in?
Sometimes, once you have enough steady work. The median UK salary for a permanent AI consultant role was £82,500 in the six months to 21 October 2026, from 157 quoted salaries. Employer National Insurance is 15 per cent above £5,000 a year in 2026 to 2027, which adds £11,625, taking the cost to about £94,000 before pension, recruitment, equipment, software and the time it takes to manage someone in a field your firm does not yet know well.
Set against that, half an embedded engineer through our managed service is from £5,500 a month, or £66,000 a year, and one full engineer is from £8,500 a month, or £102,000 a year. A permanent hire can cost less than a full embedded engineer, if you have a full-time pipeline of AI work and someone able to direct it. Most firms of 20 to 200 people do not yet, which is why fixed-fee projects and a monthly footing that can be scaled down are usually the cheaper way to start. Hiring makes sense once there is a stable, growing list of AI work you expect to last.
What pushes the price of an AI project up or down?
Five things move a quote more than anything else.
- How clear the scope is. A firm that already knows the bottleneck it wants gone can go straight to a sprint. A firm that does not pays for discovery first, and should, because building the wrong thing is the most expensive outcome of all.
- The state of your data. Information scattered across inboxes, spreadsheets and old documents takes work to bring together before AI can use it.
- How many systems it touches. One form that sets up a project in four systems, as we built for Coaching Without Borders, is more work than a tool that stands alone, and worth more.
- What you answer to. Client confidentiality, UK and EU GDPR and the rules of a chartered or professional body all shape the governance work, and it should come before the build.
- How many people must adopt it. Training and change are where returns are won or lost, and they scale with headcount.
None of these is a reason to wait. They are the questions a good quote should already have asked you.
- How clear the scope is
- The state of your data
- How many systems it touches
- What you answer to
- How many people must adopt it
How do you tell whether an AI quote is good value?
Ask for these in writing before you sign, from us or from anyone else.
- Who does the work, by name, and how senior they are.
- What you own at the end: the documents, the code and the accounts it runs in.
- A fixed price or a cap, the timeline, and what happens if it overruns.
- What is excluded: licences, hosting, data preparation and training are the usual gaps.
- Whether the price includes VAT. Professional services prices are often quoted without it, and a firm that cannot reclaim VAT at 20 per cent should add it when comparing.
- How the return will be measured, and by whom.
The last point matters most. At The Litmus Partnership, our review identified 9,672 hours a year of opportunity, and after an eight-month programme the firm now saves 268 hours a month, every figure collected from the people who use the tools. A quote that cannot say how it will measure its own return is asking you to take the value on trust. To test a fee against your own figures first, our AI ROI calculator sets the hours a team could save against the price.
If you are not sure where to begin, the free AI maturity assessment takes about two minutes and benchmarks your firm against comparable firms, and every service page sets out what is included at its price. Our guides to AI for consultancies and AI for professional services cover what the work involves.
Where do the figures in this guide come from?
AssumeAI's prices, timelines and guarantees are those published on our service pages. The outside figures were checked on 21 October 2026 and will change; each links to its source.
- IT Jobs Watch: AI consultant contract day rates, UK, six months to 21 October 2026
- IT Jobs Watch: AI engineer contract day rates, UK, six months to 21 October 2026
- IT Jobs Watch: AI consultant permanent salaries, UK, six months to 21 October 2026
- Microsoft: Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing, UK
- Anthropic: Claude plans and pricing
- GOV.UK: Rates and thresholds for employers, 2026 to 2027
- GOV.UK: VAT rates
Questions
How much does AI implementation cost for a small UK firm?
At AssumeAI's published prices, a first piece of paid work costs from £3,000 (AI governance implementation) or £4,000 (the AI Priorities Workshop), and one working AI solution built and deployed in a 30-day sprint costs from £6,000. A first year that goes from a plan to several working systems costs from roughly £10,000 to £35,000, plus any software licences. Other providers price differently, so compare what each quote includes.
How much does an AI consultant cost per day in the UK?
IT Jobs Watch, which tracks UK job adverts, gave a median contract day rate of £552 for AI consultant roles in the six months to 21 October 2026, with the middle 80 per cent between £428 and £710. AI engineer contracts had a median of £600 a day. Consultancies that sell advice rather than contractors usually charge more, and many price by project instead of by day.
Is a fixed fee or a day rate better for AI consulting?
For a defined outcome, a fixed fee is usually better for the buyer, because the consultant carries the risk of the work taking longer. A day rate suits open-ended advice where the scope genuinely cannot be fixed, but ask for a cap. Every AssumeAI service has a published fixed starting price, and each carries a guarantee about what happens if it falls short.
What does AI cost after the project is finished?
Mainly software licences, charged per user per month by the vendor, plus hosting for anything custom-built. As examples, Microsoft lists its Copilot Business add-on at £16.10 per user per month on annual billing, and Anthropic lists Claude Team standard seats at $20 per seat per month billed annually. You also need someone to look after what was built, whether that is your own team after training or a managed service.
Is it cheaper to hire an AI engineer or use a consultancy?
It depends on how much steady work you have. The median UK salary for a permanent AI consultant role was £82,500 in the six months to 21 October 2026, and employer National Insurance adds about £11,600, before pension, recruitment and tools. That suits a firm with a full-time pipeline of AI work. Fixed-fee projects or a monthly managed service suit firms that are not there yet, because they can be stopped.
Does AssumeAI publish its prices?
Yes. Every service has a published price on its service page, from £3,000 for AI governance implementation to £20,000 excluding VAT for Enterprise AI Deployment, and from £5,500 a month for the managed service. The AI maturity assessment is free.