AI consulting can mean a single conversation or software that runs in your business every day, so the price covers a wide range. What moves it is what's being built and how scattered your information is. Before you sign anything, the proposal should tell you which task it'll change.
What the work should include
Good AI work starts with how things get done in your business today. A demo can come later. It should name a few specific tasks, build something that runs on your own data, and give you a way to check whether it helped. If it ends at a strategy document, nothing in your business has changed yet.
In practice, that usually looks like this.
- A look at the tasks that take the most time or cause the most mistakes
- A short list of tasks worth automating or assisting, with the reason for each
- A working tool built on your real information and tested with the people who'll use it
- A way to measure whether it helped, agreed on before the work starts
Where it pays off
The tasks that work well are usually the boring ones.
- Reading messy incoming information, like emails or forms, and turning it into clean records
- Drafting replies that a person reviews before they go out
- Searching across documents nobody has time to read
- Flagging the few exceptions in a long list so someone only looks at the ones that matter
These are narrow tasks with clear inputs and outputs, which is why they work. If a proposal can't name the task this specifically, ask for more detail before you agree to anything.
What changes the cost
- Where your information lives. If it's already in one clean system, the work is simpler. If it's spread across email, spreadsheets, and someone's memory, gathering it takes longer.
- How much a mistake would cost. Anything touching money or customer communication needs review steps built in, and that adds work.
- Whether it connects to other software. A tool that works inside your existing systems takes more setup than one that stands alone, and some end up as custom software in their own right.
- Running it after launch. Most AI tools have a usage cost each month, and someone has to support them. That's separate from the cost to build.
Questions to ask before you start
- What specific task will this change, and how will I know it worked?
- Where does my data go, and who can see it?
- What happens when the tool gets something wrong?
- Who checks its work, and for how long?
- What does it cost to run each month, on top of the cost to build it?
Expect the tool to be wrong sometimes. What matters is whether someone catches it before it causes a problem.
Our AI consulting page explains how we approach this work, and the FAQ covers how projects are priced. If you have a task in mind, tell us about it.