AI is a Pandora's box. What comes out of it depends almost entirely on which consultant opens it — and how much real delivery they have done in an industry that reinvents itself every six months.

The price tag will not tell you. Here is what will.

The numbers, since nobody publishes them

Freelancers: £500–£750 a day
Boutiques: £600–£900, some quoting £1,500–£4,000
Big firms: £1,000–£2,500 a day, with "AI strategy" engagements at £50,000–£150,000

Those are aggregated estimates rather than rate cards, because almost nobody in this market puts prices on a page. A handful of us do. Ours: a free AI audit, £395 +VAT Claude sessions (per session, not per person — bring the whole team), £750 +VAT half-days, and AI in a Box at £1,450 +VAT setup plus £300/month with usage allowances in writing.

The shape of a sane spend for a UK small business looks like this. £0–£1,000 to find out whether AI is worth it at all. £1,000–£5,000 for a first working implementation. Five figures only against a precisely written scope.

The consultant is the variable

Here is the uncomfortable part: two consultants at the same day rate can produce opposite outcomes. One has shipped systems and watched them fail in interesting ways. The other read the same articles you did, three weeks earlier.

The industry is evolving faster than anyone's CV. That is not a reason to avoid it — it is a reason to buy differently. Small first steps, real deliverables, and a consultant who can tell you what did not work on their last three projects. Anyone with only success stories has not done much.

What "free" actually gets you

Most free audits are a sales pitch with a report attached.

Ours is ten minutes with Alice — an AI that says so in her first sentence — followed by a human-reviewed report. A meaningful share of callers are told AI is not worth their money yet. The cheapest AI project is the one you correctly do not do.

The running costs nobody quotes

Consulting fees are only part of the bill. A real implementation usually needs subscriptions, and an honest proposal names them up front:

An AI assistant plan — Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus at roughly £15–£20 per user per month; team tiers £25–£30.
Copilot, if you live in Microsoft 365 — around £25 per user per month on top of your existing licence.
API usage, if anything is automated — metered, typically £5–£50 a month at small-business volume, but it scales with use and needs a cap agreed in writing.
Automation glue — Zapier, Make or similar, £10–£30 a month where systems need connecting.

If a proposal does not list the tools and their monthly costs, the quote is incomplete. Ask for the full stack before you sign. It is the difference between a project price and the real price.

Four questions to ask before you sign

What are the specific deliverables, and against what timeline? Contract for outcomes — a working system, trained staff, documented processes — not for days of someone's time.
What usage allowances apply, and where are they written? Every AI service has real capacity limits. If a proposal says "unlimited", ask for the fair-use policy in writing before signing.
What is the error-handling process? AI produces incorrect output. That is a property of the technology, not a defect in the project. A credible proposal states who reviews outputs, at what stage, and who is accountable when something wrong reaches a customer.
What are the exit terms? Monthly rolling terms, your data exportable in a standard format, and no dependency on the consultant to operate the system day to day.

The short version

Pay a few hundred pounds to learn. Pay a few thousand for something that works. Pay monthly only for what you can cancel.

And pick the consultant, not the price.

Shumon Choudhury runs JourneyForce, an AI and Salesforce consultancy near Buckingham. Every price is published at /packages, and the free AI audit — the one delivered by an AI — is at /ai-audit.