How much does
AI consulting cost?

The honest answer to "how much does AI consulting cost" is "it depends on the scope of the audit" — a single-department use-case review is a materially different engagement from a company-wide AI roadmap. What shouldn't vary is how the price is structured: by milestone, agreed before work starts, not an hourly rate that can quietly grow as the engagement runs long.

Three things typically set the scope, and therefore the price:

• How many departments or workflows are in scope. A review of one team's use case is a smaller engagement than a plan spanning sales, support, and operations.
• Whether the output is a recommendation or an execution-ready plan. A prioritized backlog with owners and timelines costs more to produce than a slide deck of opportunities.
• Whether build work is bundled in. Consulting-only engagements and consulting-plus-build engagements are priced differently, since the second carries the implementation risk too.

Hourly consulting pricing puts the schedule risk on the client — if the engagement runs long, the invoice grows with it, regardless of whether that time produced anything useful. Milestone pricing puts that risk back where it belongs: on the firm doing the estimating. It also forces a real scoping conversation up front, which tends to produce a sharper engagement than "let's start and see where it goes."