What AI consultancy costs in the UK, and what you get

On UK price lists read on 28 October 2026, an AI readiness assessment, also sold as an AI opportunity assessment, costs from £997 for a quick audit to £10,000 and more for a full one. A pilot starts at £15,000 and a build at £40,000, and independent consultants charge £500 to £2,000 a day. Divide any package by its day rate to see how many senior days you are buying.

AI consultancy is paid advice on where AI will pay for itself in a business, ending in a written decision you can act on: build this, buy that, or leave it alone. You are paying for a decision, so the useful question is how many experienced days it takes to reach a sound one.

What do UK AI consultancies charge?

The prices below are other firms' published figures, read on 28 October 2026, not ours. "From" means the entry price, and each firm's name links to the page its figure comes from. Firms sell the first step as an AI readiness assessment, an AI opportunity assessment or an AI audit, so the table groups them by scope. The third column divides the entry price by £950 to £1,500 a day, the rate The AI Consultancy publishes and close to the £1,400 to £1,600 CTO on Demand quotes.

Tech due diligence follows the same arithmetic, and the UK price table in the technical due diligence checklist has the full spread. For comparison, we publish our own fees too. An AI readiness assessment is from £4,950, and technical due diligence for startups from £6,500. A specification sprint costs £4,500 for one week when the product is a single workflow, or £8,500 for two weeks when it is a platform.

What do AI consultants charge per day in the UK?

Day rates depend on who is selling more than on the work. We Call Shotgun's cost guide of 17 August 2026 splits them three ways, and the firms that publish their own rates fall inside its bands.

Bands this wide mean one job title covers very different people, so a price with no seniority attached tells you little. London is less clear. Optimus says London day rates run 20% to 40% above regional ones, and We Call Shotgun says the premium is modest and mostly at the top tier. Neither shows data, and the fixed fees above do not settle it. London-based firms start at £1,000, £3,500 and £5,000 (The AI Consultancy, Ronins, Hartz AI), and firms elsewhere at £997 and £2,999 (All Sorted AI, AI Expert UK).

Count the days, not the deliverables

A package price hides the only number that tells you what you are getting. Two to four days buys interviews with the people who run your processes and a shortlist at the end of them. It rarely buys a baseline, because finding out how long a process takes today means sitting with the people who do it, and that is days on its own. Without a baseline, nobody can tell you afterwards whether the AI helped.

The step that gets squeezed is the expensive one to get wrong. RAND interviewed 65 experienced data scientists and engineers about why AI projects fail, and the root cause they named most often was leadership getting the problem wrong, or never explaining it clearly (RAND, 2024). A cheap assessment has usually saved its money on that step.

Then ask whose days they are. An assessment by someone who has put AI into production and one by someone who has only read about it can cost the same and arrive looking the same. You tell them apart by how specific they get. Advice from people who build names the data a use case needs and the failure it will produce first, while advice from a template names opportunities.

Pilot to production is where the money goes

Advice costs little next to what follows it: a pilot that has to survive real data and then change how people work, which is where adoption numbers and depth part company for most small businesses.

A pilot fails when the people who have to use its output stop reading it. On a coaching platform we build, a long AI-generated plan was reaching the professional with around 87 review notes attached, and when we counted, 91% of the warnings were one note repeated for every day.

The fix went in a deliberate order. First the cause: meals were being portioned below the day's target, so a scaler now brings each day to target within a clamp of 35% either way. What remained was collapsed into a handful of plan-level notes somebody will read; tidying the report first would have hidden the fault under a neater page. Most pilot work looks like this: count first, then change the thing the count points at.

When a pilot turns into a product, the numbers change shape. Our band for a single-workflow product built to production standard is £35,000 to £80,000 over six to twelve weeks. Running it needs a budget line of 20 to 30 per cent of the build cost a year. A consultancy that stops at the pilot should still tell you both figures, because they decide whether the pilot was worth running.

Governance: a pack of documents with dates on it

Governance work is mostly writing things down. For most small companies it takes days, because most use AI tools they bought and sell no AI of their own. Whether the EU rules reach you at all turns on where your AI's output is used, which the EU AI Act guide for UK companies works through.

Since 27 July 2026, the EU AI Act's Article 4 has asked providers and deployers to take steps that support their staff's AI literacy, with no particular level guaranteed (Regulation (EU) 2026/1744). The transparency duties have applied, with enforcement powers switched on, since 2 August 2026 (European Commission, 2026). In the UK, the Data (Use and Access) Act's automated decision rules, Articles 22A to 22D of the UK GDPR, have applied since 5 February 2026 (the Act, section 80).

The engagement should hand over an inventory of the AI systems you use and your role for each, and a two-page AI use policy. It should also hand over a data protection impact assessment wherever personal data meets a model, and the safeguards for any decision about a person that a system makes on its own.

That is the shape of our own advice. The fee is fixed in writing before the work starts, and we hand over documents the client keeps at the end of every AI consultancy engagement, whether or not we build anything afterwards.

When should you not buy consultancy at all?

More often than consultancies' websites suggest, ours included. In DSIT's survey of 3,500 UK businesses, run between February and May 2025, two factors were most often said to prevent AI adoption, now or in the past. They were not having identified a use (71%) and limited skills (60%). Cost was cited by 23% (DSIT, 2026). In a separate survey commissioned by Microsoft, which sells the sanctioned alternative, 71% of UK employees reported using consumer AI tools their employer had not approved, and 51% still did so weekly (Microsoft UK, 2025).

If that describes your office, the first spend is licences for an approved tool and a short written policy, not a consultant. The government's free AI Skills Hub courses cover the basics, some in under twenty minutes (DSIT, 2026). And if the task you have in mind follows the same steps every time, it may need only a workflow, which the agent, chatbot or workflow question settles in ninety seconds.

Sometimes the right move is to wait. The current version of a healthcare platform we build has no AI features at all, and we chose that deliberately. The notes are structured so a drafting feature can arrive later behind a clinician's review. Its rules were written before any code. Processing stays in the UK or EU, customer data is never used for training, an impact assessment comes before anything else, and the feature stays off until a practice switches it on. When the feature does arrive, nobody will be retrofitting rules to something customers already rely on.

What buyers ask us about cost

What are typical AI consultant day rates in the UK?

£500 to £2,000 for independents and £900 to £1,600 for mid-tier firms, according to We Call Shotgun's August 2026 guide, with large consultancies at £2,000 to £5,000. Published rate cards agree. The AI Consultancy charges £950 to £1,500 and CTO on Demand £1,400 to £1,600. The spread tracks seniority, and whether the person has built what they advise on.

How much does an AI opportunity assessment cost in the UK?

A quick audit starts at £997, and a full assessment runs to £10,000 or more. Of the firms read, most start between £3,500 and £5,000 for the whole business, and ours starts at £4,950. Firms call the same step a readiness assessment, an opportunity assessment or an audit. It earns its fee if it ends in a shortlist where each item has an owner, a baseline number and an estimated running cost.

Is a fixed-price AI consultancy quote better than a day rate?

For a defined first step, usually yes. A fixed fee lets you compare quotes and caps the bill, and The AI Consultancy says it offers a day rate only where the scope is too open for a fixed quote. Ask what triggers a change order, who does the work and what the fee leaves out. Ours are fixed in writing before work begins.

What hidden costs come with AI consultancy?

Four recur. Tool licences and model usage, which a price list may exclude (The AI Consultancy's does). Training and adoption, which We Call Shotgun's guide says to ask about if it is not itemised. Change orders on fixed quotes. And running the result, which for software is 20 to 30 per cent of the build cost a year.

Does AI consultancy cost more in London?

Possibly. Optimus puts London day rates 20% to 40% above regional ones, while We Call Shotgun calls the premium modest and mostly confined to the top tier. Neither publishes data, and the fixed fees we read show no clear London pattern. Compare the deliverable and who does the work, not the postcode.

Can a grant pay for AI consultancy?

Occasionally, and rarely for advice. Made Smarter gives manufacturing and engineering SMEs in England free impartial advice and up to 50% matched grant funding to adopt hardware and software, in the regions it covers (Made Smarter). Innovate UK's Frontier AI: SME Champions, Phase 1 funds feasibility studies of new AI, not advice. It closes on 11 November 2026, bars subcontractors and puts the chance of success at 2% (Innovate UK). The Mayor of London announced a £12 million AI programme for London SMEs on 8 June 2026, with no eligibility rules or start date published yet (Mayor of London). Checked 28 October 2026.

Do we need ISO 42001 certification?

Probably not yet. ISO/IEC 42001 certifies the way a company runs its AI and says nothing about whether any one system is safe or lawful, and ISO says it replaces no law (ISO, 2023). UKAS listed five accredited UK certification bodies in September 2026 (UKAS, 2026). Buy it when a customer's procurement asks, after the policy and inventory exist.

What should an AI consultancy engagement produce?

A written decision on what to build, what to buy and what to leave alone, in what order, with an owner, a baseline and a second-year running cost for each. The documents should be portable enough to hand another supplier. If the output only makes sense with the consultant in the room, the engagement is not finished.