--- title: "AI consulting for UK businesses: costs and returns" description: "What AGMM charges and what comes back: a free fit call, a £2,000 fourteen-day audit, a priced build proposal, and the honest arithmetic on whether it pays." canonical: https://agmm.co.uk/what-it-costs/ updated: 2026-10-13 updated_basis: the date the page itself states published: 2026-08-15 publisher: AGMM (https://agmm.co.uk/about/agmm.json) lang: en-GB --- What it costs # Is AI consulting worth it for a UK business? By [Sam Wall](https://agmm.co.uk/about/sam-wall/) and [Adam Gillett](https://agmm.co.uk/about/adam-gillett/) Checked on 13 October 2026 Working with AGMM starts with a free 30-minute fit call and a fixed £2,000, 14-day audit. Builds, ongoing support and advisory work are each priced by proposal, with scope and price agreed before any code is written. Below is every cost, what comes back, and the arithmetic on whether AI consulting pays. [Book the free fit call](https://agmm.co.uk/ai-constraint-audit/#book) **Free, 30 minutes** No obligation to go further - Every step priced before it starts - Nothing to commit to on day one - Something you keep at the end of each one Or call [0161 543 7189](tel:+441615437189) - Fit call30 minutes Free - Constraint audit14 days £2,000 - BuildScoped and priced by the audit Custom build proposal - Ongoing supportScoped to the deployed systems Custom ongoing proposal The four steps ## What does working with AGMM cost? Four steps, and you can stop after any of them. The fit call tests whether the commercial problem is worth investigating. The audit maps constraints, tests viable opportunities and ranks the investment. A build and any ongoing support follow only where the evidence justifies them, each scoped and priced in its own proposal. 1. Step one ### Fit call Free30 minutes Test whether the problem is worth investigating. In thirty minutes we test the commercial stakes, whether AGMM is a fit and what evidence the team can provide. Nothing is purchased on the call. You leave withA straight answer on whether the fourteen-day audit is the right next step. 2. Step two ### Constraint audit £2,00014 days Map the business, price the opportunities and rank the investment. Fourteen days and three sixty-minute working sessions with the two founders who will scope the build. Between them, AGMM maps constraints across the business, tests viable AI opportunities and builds the economic case for each justified option. You leave withA business-wide constraint map, AI opportunity map, economic cases, ranked priorities and a custom build proposal where the evidence warrants one. 3. Step three ### Build Custom build proposalScoped and priced by the audit The price is agreed before anyone writes code. The scope follows the opportunity, from one focused system to a larger programme spanning teams and workflows. We design, write, integrate, test and deploy against your real data, your real rules and the exceptions your team already works around. The audit sets the scope, so the proposal reflects the work required rather than an arbitrary band. You leave withThe first systems in ordinary daily use, and a team that can operate them without us in the room. 4. Step four ### Ongoing support Custom ongoing proposalScoped to the deployed systems If ongoing support is needed, its scope and price are agreed before it starts. Ongoing support is proposed separately after the build. Its scope and price depend on the systems in production, integrations, monitoring, response requirements, ownership and improvement cadence. It may include changes as well as uptime: rules move, people join, volumes shift, and the support proposal reflects what the business needs. You leave withA written support proposal covering responsibilities, service boundaries, review points and price, with no default monthly band imposed on every system. Only two of those four carry a number before we have met, deliberately. A build price quoted before anybody has measured the process is a guess dressed as a quote. For what other UK firms publish, sorted by price with a source for each figure, see [what other UK AI consultants charge](https://agmm.co.uk/compare/ai-consultancy-cost-uk/) . What you are buying ## What does AI consulting for a business include? Finding where time and money get stuck across every department, testing where AI pays, and then building, running or advising on the systems that win it back. For a business turning over £1m to £50m, that covers six areas. - ### Finance Month-end close, cash collection and management reporting, so the numbers arrive in days, not weeks. - ### People Hiring, onboarding and staff training, so a new starter is ready before day one. - ### Customer service Complaints, queries and retention, answered with the full history in front of the person replying. - ### Operations and suppliers Scheduling, stock, purchasing and delivery, with fewer hand-offs and fewer surprises. - ### Sales and marketing Pipeline, proposals, follow-up and the content line, which is one part of marketing and not the whole of it. - ### Leadership Board reporting and decisions with context, so the founders spend their time on the 5% that is judgement. Start with the evidence, not a pre-selected build. [Book the free fit call](https://agmm.co.uk/ai-constraint-audit/#book) The constraint audit ## The 14-day audit: £2,000. 14 days, built around three sixty-minute working sessions with the founders who would scope the build. It finds constraints, weak points and opportunities to save or earn serious money, and a fuller audit always follows inside any build proposal. A free audit is a sales call with a document attached, and it has to arrive at a recommendation to build something, because that is the only way it ever pays for itself. Output 1 of 4 The constraint map 1. Where work waits 2. What it costs 3. What to change first Yours to keep Output 2 of 4 The AI opportunity map 1. Each viable opportunity 2. What it depends on 3. Where a person stays in control Yours to keep Output 3 of 4 The economic cases 1. Upside and cost 2. Assumptions, labelled 3. Risk Yours to keep Output 4 of 4 The ranked next step 1. The investment order 2. Scope and fixed price 3. What it will not do Yours to keep *What the £2,000 produces, and what you keep whether or not anything gets built. The measurements come from your process, not from a benchmark.* ### What happens between the calls - Operating constraints mapped across departments, including undocumented hand-offs - Viable AI opportunities separated from simpler process and system fixes - Human controls, dependencies and failure conditions written down - Economic cases built from the figures and evidence your business can support - Opportunities ranked by projected return and operational value ### What you keep if you never build anything - The constraint map A business-wide view of where capacity, cash and decisions are held up. - The AI opportunity map The viable opportunities, the dependencies underneath them and where a person must remain in control. - The economic cases Upside, cost, assumptions and risk for every opportunity worth considering. - The ranked next step A prioritised investment order and a custom proposal for the highest-value justified scope. You can use it with AGMM, take it elsewhere or stop. The fee is not deducted from the build. That is deliberate, and it is the whole point: it means we carry no financial reason to recommend building anything, so the recommendation is worth reading. **The call comes first.** Thirty minutes, free, so we both know the audit is worth £2,000 before you spend it. [Book the free fit call](https://agmm.co.uk/ai-constraint-audit/#book) Where the fee goes ## What the £2,000 buys, line by line. Fourteen days, three sessions, four documents. Here is the work behind it, in order. 1. Day 1 2. Day 2 3. Day 3 4. Day 4 5. Day 5 6. Day 6 7. Day 7 8. Day 8 9. Day 9 10. Day 10 11. Day 11 12. Day 12 13. Day 13 14. Day 14 1. **Days one to three: the map of what happens in practice.** We sit with the people doing the work and write the process down as it runs, not as the procedure says it runs, including the hand-offs nobody has documented. Most businesses have never seen this in one place. 2. **Days four to seven: the measurements underneath it.** Volumes, waiting time against working time, rework, and where a job queues, taken from your own exports, timestamps and diaries rather than sector benchmarks. A benchmark tells you about somebody else. 3. **Days eight to eleven: opportunities, separated and tested.** Viable AI opportunities are separated from the ones that are really a process fix, a pricing decision or a system nobody configured properly. Each survivor gets its dependencies, failure conditions and the point where a human must stay in control written down. 4. **Days twelve to fourteen: the economic case and the ranking.** Upside, cost, assumptions and risk for every opportunity worth considering, then a ranked investment order and a fixed price for the highest-value scope the evidence justifies. The assumptions are shown, so you can disagree. All four documents are yours outright: build with us, take them elsewhere, or file them and do nothing. Exclusions ## What is never in the price. Run this against every quote, ours included. The difference between three quotes is usually here, not in the headline fee. - **Software, model and hosting costs.** Licences, API usage and hosting are billed to you by the vendor at their price, not marked up and resold. The expected monthly figure is named in the build proposal so it is a decision rather than a surprise. - **Your team’s time.** Three sixty-minute sessions, plus the hours spent pulling exports and checking that what we wrote down matches what happens. Real cost, and nobody carries it for you. - **The build itself.** The audit prices the build. It does not include it, and the audit fee is not deducted from it. - **Data you were always going to have to fix.** Where records are inconsistent enough that no system could read them reliably, sorting that out is its own piece of work, scoped separately rather than absorbed into a build. - **Wider team training.** We hand over systems your team can run and show them how. Training for the wider team is online only: AI webinar workshops, one-to-one sessions and the free courses in the Library. Nothing is delivered in person, and workshops are scoped and priced through the free fit call. - **Anything the proposal does not name.** If it is not in the written scope it is not in the price, and the change process is agreed before the build starts. The awkward outcome ## What happens if we find nothing? It happens, and it is a result rather than a failure. Sometimes the process is already tight and the money is going somewhere else. Sometimes the constraint is a pricing decision, a staffing decision or a rule nobody has written down, and software on top of any of those makes the problem faster rather than smaller. When that is the answer you get it in writing with the measurements behind it, you keep all four documents, and you owe nothing further. No second proposal, no consolation retainer, no smaller build invented to justify the fortnight. We are paid the same either way, which is the only arrangement that makes "do not build this" trustworthy from the firm that would have built it. It is not a refund. You bought fourteen days of measurement and received them. What changed is the decision they point to. The other side of the ledger ## Every number above is a cost. Here is the return. Take four people who each spend six hours a week retyping month-end figures and chasing invoices, at £34 an hour loaded. That is 1,104 hours and roughly £37,500 a year flowing through work software could carry, before you count the cash that arrived late. Your number will be different, which is the point: the £2,000 audit exists to measure it, and a build is only proposed when the fixed price stands a serious chance of repaying itself inside a year. That arithmetic is illustrative and labelled as such, because it is built from a worked example rather than a client. It is worth spelling out what the return is made of, because "efficiency" is not a line in anybody's accounts. - **Hours that move from people to software.** The clearest and the easiest to overstate. It becomes money only when those hours are redeployed onto work that earns, or never hired for. If the same people do the same jobs slightly faster, the saving is invisible in the accounts, and we say so rather than counting it. - **Work that stops waiting.** Usually the larger number and almost never the one a business measures. An enquiry answered the same day rather than four days later saves no labour; it changes the odds on the sale. The audit measures queueing separately from working time for that reason. - **Errors that stop reaching the customer.** Rework already has a cost visible in your own data: credits raised, orders re-sent, the complaint that arrives twice. - **Capacity you do not have to hire.** Not "replaces a person". The next twenty per cent of volume arrives without the next hire, a number your own growth plan already contains. - **Decisions made on figures rather than instinct.** Named here because leaving it out would mislead you, and counted at zero because we cannot measure it. What we will not do is show you a percentage from somebody else's case study. AGMM has no published client outcome it can link, so there is no ROI multiple here. Ask any firm quoting one for the baseline and who measured it. Work that stops waiting, drawn ## Where does the return come from? Watch three jobs run twice. Month-end close, a new starter and a customer complaint, each run the usual way and through a system. The saving is rarely the typing. It is the days a job spends waiting for someone to be free, which the system turns into minutes and one decision that stays with a person. A £14m distributor closing September: 1,284 bank lines across four accounts, 212 open invoices and 41 of them overdue. Demonstration of our real architecture. Timings compressed. ### The usual way People, inboxes and spreadsheets **Closed after 5 days 12 h** 91% of that time was waiting, not work. ### Through a system Built from how your business already works **Closed after 2 h 12 min** 2 of 7 steps waited on a person. That is the judgement that stays yours. Names, figures and documents are illustrative, drawn from no client. Solid lengths are work, dashed lengths are waiting, on a logarithmic rule so minutes and days fit one line. Delivery times from suppliers and couriers are left out. Select any step to read its document. Doing the sum yourself ## How do you work out whether it is worth it for you? You can get most of the way to an answer in an afternoon, without buying anything. Four numbers. 1. **Pick the one process that hurts.** Not the whole business: the one where work piles up, where somebody is the single point of failure, or where customers chase you. 2. **Count how often it runs a week, and how long it takes.** Rough is fine. Ask the person who does it rather than the person who owns it: the two answers are rarely the same. 3. **Multiply by a loaded hourly cost.** Salary plus employer costs over working hours. A £76,000 salary is roughly £55 an hour loaded, and being ten per cent out does not change the decision. 4. **Add what the waiting costs.** Sales lost to a slow reply, invoices sent late, the delivery that happened twice. Usually larger than the hours, and almost always the number nobody has. The first three numbers, on one instrument. Turn the dials. 25people doing repeat work 6hours each, every week £55loaded cost per hour £379,500 a year, at your rate 6,900 hours a year The full working year of 4 people, spent on work a system could carry. Each figure is one person’s full working year: 1,725 hours. 25 people × 6 hours × 46 working weeks = 6,900 hours. × £55 = £379,500. £379,500 Cost for the year, to the end of December Each block is one person’s full working week, 37.5 hours Six weeks left empty for holidays and bank holidays Running cost through the year The same bill, in things you already weigh up. Your turnover £1m£2m£5m£10m£25m£50m In salaries 4 full-time salaries At your £55 an hour, one full-time year costs £94,875. This bill is 4 of them. In your diary 920 working days a year 20 working days of 7.5 hours go on it every week. If it all landed in your own diary it would fill 4 working years. In sales 7.6% of a £5m year’s sales About 28 days of everything the business sells. A month of sales at £5m turnover is £416,667, so this bill is 91% of one month. £379,500 a year: 6,900 hours, the full working year of 4 people. Pure arithmetic of your own inputs, set here at the £55 loaded hour above, the cost of a £76,000 manager or senior specialist. Loaded cost means salary plus employer costs, per hour. 46 working weeks of 37.5 hours make a working year of 1,725 hours. The fourth number, what the waiting costs, is the one the audit measures. If that total is comfortably under £2,000 a year, keep your money. If it is several times the audit fee, the question is no longer whether to measure it properly but who you trust to do the measuring. And if you cannot produce the numbers at all, that is itself the finding: a business that cannot see a process cannot price fixing it. Evidence ## Can you show how you work? Yes, and it is open. We run our own business on the systems we sell: one of our knowledge bases holds 4,535 notes and 5.9 million words, and every system in it, from sales and finance to people and customer service, is drawn department by department on [the Inside AGMM page](https://agmm.co.uk/evidence/) . It is not a case study and claims no saving. It is the kind of artefact this market does not produce, and the thing to ask every firm you brief for. What we cannot show yet is a named client outcome with a published figure, and we will not imply one. Beyond the four steps ## Can you deploy across more than one business? Some owners do not run one business. They run several, and every one of them has the same rot: work moving by hand, one person holding the process together, nobody able to see across any of it. Hiring a technology team into each company is absurd. Deploy one team into all of them instead. 01 ### One team across the whole group Not a technology hire in every company. The same team embedded across everything you own, who already know how you operate and how you decide. 02 ### AI is why a small team can carry it We build the tooling we work with. Our capacity stopped being our headcount, which is the only reason deploying across several businesses is possible at all. 03 ### What one company learns, the rest inherit A system proven in one of your businesses ports to the next one in days. The second deployment is not a second build. **This is for owners with more than one business, and it is not step five.** It starts as a conversation once the first systems are live in the first company. Ask on the call. The market ## What does everyone else charge? Useful context, because the range in this market is enormous and nobody publishes it side by side. These are the bands UK firms advertise, read from their own pricing pages. - **Independent or freelance** To build £5,000 to £15,000 - **UK boutique AI consultancy** To build £20,000 to £150,000 - **Big four and enterprise** To build £60,000 to £300,000 and up *Each bar runs from the bottom to the top of a published band, on a logarithmic scale so £5,000 and £300,000 fit one rule. The cyan line is the fixed fee for the AGMM audit, which prices a build rather than delivering one.* *Published UK AI implementation pricing, read 13 October 2026* | Who | To build | To keep it running | | --- | --- | --- | | Independent or freelance | £5,000 to £15,000 | Rarely offered | | UK boutique AI consultancy | £20,000 to £150,000 | £2,000 to £20,000 a month | | Big four and enterprise | £60,000 to £300,000 and up | Retained programmes | Named firms, sorted by what each one publishes, with sources and dates: [the UK published price index](https://agmm.co.uk/compare/ai-consultancy-cost-uk/) . Our proposal follows the scope the audit proves, from one focused system to a larger programme spanning teams and workflows. There is no artificial ceiling, and the people who scope the work are the people who lead the build. Where we stop ## When will we tell you not to build? The audit sometimes finds the constraint is not a software problem. When it is a pricing decision, a staffing decision, or a process nobody has written down yet, putting software on top of it makes the problem faster rather than smaller, and more expensive to unpick later. When that is the answer, that is the answer, and you still keep the audit. Before you decide ## What is the worst case? You spend £2,000. Fourteen days later you know what the process costs you, which steps are queueing, and what we would build, priced. Then we tell you not to build it, because the numbers land small. You keep every document and owe us nothing further. That is the worst case, and it is more than most firms in this market deliver as their best. Is this money well spent for you ## Who is this right for, and who should keep their money? ### Worth the call - A team whose week is part coordination, part retyping, part chasing - An owner who wants the problem handled, not another tool to learn - A process that costs more than the £2,000 it takes to measure it - Someone in the room who can approve a custom build when the economic case is clear ### Keep your money - You want a chatbot on the website and nothing behind it - Nothing in the operation hurts yet - You want in-person workshops. Our team training is online only - The budget would strain the business rather than repay it Before you spend ## What do buyers ask about the money? The questions owners ask before the fit call: what it costs, what is included, whether it pays for a business of their size, and what happens if the answer is not to build. 1. **How much does AI consulting cost for a UK business?With AGMM it starts with a free 30-minute fit call and a fixed £2,000, 14-day audit. Builds, ongoing support and advisory work are each priced by proposal.** With AGMM it starts with a free 30-minute fit call and a fixed £2,000, 14-day audit. Builds, ongoing support and advisory work are each priced by proposal. For context, published UK bands run from a £999 audit and £5,000 projects with freelancers to £60,000 to £300,000 and up at the largest firms. [What other UK AI consultants charge](https://agmm.co.uk/compare/ai-consultancy-cost-uk/) 2. **What does AI consulting for a business include?Finding where time and money get stuck in every department, testing where AI pays, and then building, running or advising on the systems that win it back: finance and month-end, people and…** Finding where time and money get stuck in every department, testing where AI pays, and then building, running or advising on the systems that win it back: finance and month-end, people and onboarding, customer service, operations and suppliers, sales and marketing, and the decisions leadership has to make. [See every service](https://agmm.co.uk/services/) 3. **Do you publish fixed prices?The 30-minute fit call is free and the business-wide AI Constraint Audit is a fixed £2,000.** The 30-minute fit call is free and the business-wide AI Constraint Audit is a fixed £2,000. Every build receives a custom proposal at the end of the audit, scoped to the opportunity, systems, data and delivery risk. Any ongoing support is proposed separately. Its scope and price depend on the deployed systems, integrations, monitoring, response requirements, ownership and improvement cadence. [What the £2,000 audit covers](https://agmm.co.uk/ai-constraint-audit/) 4. **Why is the audit paid rather than free?A free audit is a sales call with a document attached. It has to arrive at a recommendation to build something, because that is the only way it ever pays for itself.** A free audit is a sales call with a document attached. It has to arrive at a recommendation to build something, because that is the only way it ever pays for itself. Ours is paid, and the fee is not deducted from the build, so we carry no financial reason to recommend building anything. 5. **What happens if the audit says do not build anything?That is a legitimate result and you still keep the audit. When the constraint is a pricing decision, a staffing decision or a process nobody has written down, software on top of it makes…** That is a legitimate result and you still keep the audit. When the constraint is a pricing decision, a staffing decision or a process nobody has written down, software on top of it makes the problem faster rather than smaller. 6. **Why are your prices lower than a bigger consultancy?Because you are paying the people who do the work, not the people between you and it. There is no sales team, no account layer and nobody billing for coordination.** Because you are paying the people who do the work, not the people between you and it. There is no sales team, no account layer and nobody billing for coordination. Most of what a larger firm charges is the cost of that middle. 7. **Is AI consulting worth it for a small or mid-sized business?Only where the process being fixed costs more than the work to fix it. That is arithmetic rather than opinion, and the £2,000 audit exists to do the arithmetic on your figures before…** Only where the process being fixed costs more than the work to fix it. That is arithmetic rather than opinion, and the £2,000 audit exists to do the arithmetic on your figures before anybody commits to a build. If the numbers land small, the honest answer is to keep your money, and you still keep the documents. [Try the free AI readiness check](https://agmm.co.uk/ai-readiness-assessment/) 8. **How long before a build pays for itself?We only propose a build where the fixed price stands a serious chance of repaying itself inside a year on your own figures, and the economic case shows the assumptions we used so you can…** We only propose a build where the fixed price stands a serious chance of repaying itself inside a year on your own figures, and the economic case shows the assumptions we used so you can disagree with them. We publish no payback multiple, because we have no client results we can link, and a number nobody can check is worth nothing. 9. **Can we start smaller than £2,000?The fit call is free and thirty minutes, and exists to tell you whether the audit is worth buying at all.** The fit call is free and thirty minutes, and exists to tell you whether the audit is worth buying at all. Below it there is nothing meaningful to sell: a cheaper look at one process you already suspect is a guess with an invoice attached. 10. **What do you charge for ongoing support?It is proposed after the build rather than sold as a band up front, because the right number depends on what is in production, how it is integrated, what monitoring it needs and how fast…** It is proposed after the build rather than sold as a band up front, because the right number depends on what is in production, how it is integrated, what monitoring it needs and how fast the business changes. Published UK retainers run £200 to £20,000 a month, which is why a default band would be a guess. ## Book the free 30-minute fit call. The free fit call tests whether the problem is commercially meaningful enough for the fourteen-day, £2,000 audit. Nothing is purchased on the call. [Book the free fit call](https://agmm.co.uk/ai-constraint-audit/#book) Or read [the evidence](https://agmm.co.uk/evidence/) and [what we build](https://agmm.co.uk/services/) 1. Before day 1**Fit call** Free, 30 minutes 2. Day 01**Map the business** Constraints and weak points 3. Day 07**Price the opportunities** What could save or earn 4. Day 14**Rank the investment** Four outputs you keep **Then the proposal.** The fuller audit is always part of it. *Three 60-minute working sessions with the founders who would scope any build. Between them, we map, measure and price.* --- Source: https://agmm.co.uk/what-it-costs/ · AGMM, a UK AI consultancy · company facts: https://agmm.co.uk/about/agmm.json · every page: https://agmm.co.uk/llms.txt