The honest answer to what an AI pilot costs a $10M to $150M company is that it depends on the workflow. I don’t publish a rate card because two projects with the same label can be very different amounts of work. What I can do is show you what moves the price, so you can get a rough sense of where your project sits before we talk.
Why there’s no single price
A weekly report built from one spreadsheet export might be a week of work. A tool that reads supplier documents, checks them against your item master and drafts entries for someone to approve could be two months. Both get called “AI.” If I priced them the same way, I’d either overcharge one company or underbuild for the other, and neither is a good outcome for you.
So every project gets a one-page proposal with a fixed fee. You see the scope, what you get and the price before any work starts. The price only changes if the scope does.
What drives the cost
| Cost driver | Smaller pilot | Bigger pilot |
|---|---|---|
| Where the data comes from | One export you already run | Several systems, or documents and email |
| How it connects | A file export on a schedule | A live connection to your systems |
| What it produces | A list or report a person reads | Drafts that feed a next step, like order entry or a price change |
| Who uses it | One person or team | Several roles, each needing their own view |
| How messy the data is | Consistent IDs and fields | Item or customer names that don’t match across systems |
| Support after handoff | Training and a runbook | Ongoing tuning and monitoring |
Most first pilots should land on the left side of that table. A narrow project gets built in about 30 days and proves itself on real work, which tells you whether the next one is worth paying for. My concern with starting big is time. A bigger first project takes longer to show anything, and by the time it does, people have often moved on to the next priority.
What’s in the price
The fee covers one workflow, scoped and written down before I start. The tool runs in accounts your company owns, so it keeps working if we stop working together. We agree up front on one before-and-after measure, like hours spent or items missed, so we both know whether it paid off. I train the people who use it, and you get a runbook for keeping it running along with a list of every software account and cost it depends on.
Costs that sit outside the fee
Some tools carry their own monthly charges, like an AI model’s usage fees or a hosting account. Those go on your accounts and your card, so you see exactly what you’re paying and can cancel without going through me. For most first pilots they’re small, and the proposal lists them up front.
The cost people tend to underestimate is their own team’s time. Plan on about an hour a week from the person who does the task today, plus one decision-maker who can say yes or no. If you can’t free up either one right now, I’d wait. A pilot without an owner usually turns into a tool nobody uses, and that’s money wasted.
How to keep a first pilot affordable
Pick a task someone already does often, so the payoff shows up fast. Work from an export you already have instead of paying for a new integration. Have the tool draft and flag things for a person to approve before anything happens automatically. And measure one thing well instead of five things loosely. Each of those keeps the build smaller and makes the result easier to judge.
If you’re not sure where to start, this guide to picking your first AI project has five questions that sort good candidates from bad ones. For the bigger picture, see AI strategy for mid-sized companies.
When a pilot isn’t worth paying for
If a spreadsheet or a setting in a system you already own fixes the problem, I’ll tell you that on the first call. Same if nobody does the task today, or the data you’d need doesn’t exist yet. In those cases your money is better spent somewhere else.
Next step
Bring one workflow that’s eating your team’s time to a 30-minute call. I’ll tell you which side of the table it falls on and whether I think it’s worth building. If it is, you’ll get a one-page proposal with a fixed fee. If you want to see what a finished pilot looks like first, click through the live samples.
