What does an AI consultancy cost in the UK?

Most UK AI consultancies won’t put a number on their website, so here are ours. Our AI Audit is £10,000 excluding VAT at standard scope, ending in a written report and a costed implementation roadmap. The Embedded AI Lead engagement, which many businesses take on afterwards, starts from £5,000 a month excluding VAT. Published UK market ranges put a single-workflow agent at roughly £10,000 to £30,000, and multi-agent work spanning several systems at £40,000 to £150,000 (OpenKit AI development cost guide). Regulated environments add ten to twenty percent for the security and audit work. OpenKit never quotes from a rate card: we scope each build against a defined outcome first.

The rest of this guide is where each figure comes from and what moves it, because two honest quotes for the same brief can sit far apart once you see what each firm priced in.

What UK AI consultancy work costs, at a glance.

Engagement	OpenKit	UK market range
AI Audit	£10,000 excluding VAT, standard scope	Usually quoted only after a call
Embedded AI Lead	From £5,000 a month excluding VAT	£2,000 to £15,000 a month for fractional AI leadership, by days per week
Bespoke build	Scoped from the roadmap, priced to an outcome	£10,000 to £30,000 for one workflow; £40,000 to £150,000 across several systems
Day rates	None published	Widely quoted; meaningless without a day count

The OpenKit column is our published fees. The market column is what other UK firms publish, and the sections below say where each figure comes from.

What an AI audit costs.

Most OpenKit engagements start with the audit, and its fee is agreed in writing before anything else happens. What lifts the figure above £10,000 is scope: how many workflows and systems you want in range, and the interviews it takes to map them properly. The output is a written report and a prioritised roadmap with an estimated cost against each recommendation. Those costs are planning estimates with their assumptions written down, not a fixed price to build every line. What an audit looks like from the inside covers the method.

Across the UK market the same work sells as discovery or as a readiness assessment, and it’s usually quoted only after a call, because the work changes shape with every client. The fee for the agreed scope does not move.

What an AI retainer costs.

After the audit, many businesses keep us on to deliver what it found. Carrying on is a separate decision. Where you take it, OpenKit becomes your business’s embedded AI team, working alongside your people on the priorities the roadmap sets. That engagement is the Embedded AI Lead, from £5,000 a month excluding VAT. It reserves an agreed total delivery allocation covering on-site work, remote implementation, meetings, support and documentation.

The nearest thing sold elsewhere is fractional AI leadership, where UK firms selling the service advertise between £2,000 and £15,000 a month depending on days per week. The overlap in price hides a gap in what the money buys. A fractional executive sells you a person’s days, so the direction is theirs but the build still needs your team or another supplier. We set the routes against each other in our chief AI officer guide.

What a bespoke build costs.

A build is priced from what the audit finds, drawn from your own data and systems, so the number is for your work and arrives with the reasoning attached. Smaller automations and connectors sit inside an Embedded AI Lead engagement rather than being quoted one by one. The market ranges at the top of this page are the way to sanity-check any quote you’re already holding, and what pushes a project toward either end of them is covered in our development cost guide: data readiness first, then how many systems the AI has to touch, then the governance the work carries.

Some roadmap lines are not builds at all. Where an off-the-shelf tool does the job for less, the roadmap says so, and the cost against that line is a subscription. We can say that because the audit does not need the answer to be a build. What we build when a build is warranted is on the AI engineering page.

Day rates versus fixed fees.

Most UK consultancy work is sold one of two ways, a day rate for a team or a fixed fee for a defined outcome, and the day rate is the less informative number even though it looks easier to compare. The total is the rate multiplied by a day count nobody has fixed yet. A low rate across a long, badly scoped engagement costs more than a higher rate across a tight one.

We publish starting fees and no day rates at all, because a rate without a day count says nothing about the bill. If you’re comparing day-rate proposals, ask for the work scoped in days against a defined outcome, then judge the rate against the total it produces.

What moves the price up or down.

For the audit the lever is range, meaning the workflows and systems in scope and the interview count that follows from them. For the retainer it’s the mix inside each month: how much is build work against the roadmap and how much is steering. For builds the drivers are larger and better documented. Data readiness comes first, integration comes second, and governance is the one most quotes understate, because access controls, audit trails and security documentation take real engineering time in a regulated environment.

Prices move down too. A scoping call that removes workflows is doing its job, and the cheapest line in most roadmaps is the one that says buy, or the one that says leave the process alone.

How to budget the first year.

You do not have to commit to the year up front. A free AI readiness check takes minutes and tells you which of the drivers above will weigh on your figure. The audit follows at its agreed fee, the roadmap it produces puts an estimated cost against everything after it, and the initial commitment for any implementation engagement is agreed before that work begins, so at no point in the first year are you signed up for spend you haven’t seen justified. The fees and what each covers are on the pricing page, and the exact figure always arrives in writing before you sign anything.