In 2026, most UK AI consultancies charge either a day rate or a fixed fee. ExpertSure's September 2026 comparison of UK AI automation consultants puts day rates at £450 to £1,800, with small-business projects starting from about £5,000. Fixed-fee packages, like ours, start at £4,500 for an AI readiness assessment and reach £15,000 for a production AI agent.
The price model matters as much as the number. Day-rate consultancy has an incentive problem that rarely gets said out loud: the firm earns more the longer the work runs. That does not make day-rate firms dishonest, but the model itself does not reward getting you to a working result quickly.
What day-rate AI consultancy actually costs
Published day rates for UK AI consultants run from about £450 to £1,800 a day, according to ExpertSure's 2026 comparison, which checked prices in September 2026. Large consultancies rarely publish rates at all. A discovery phase on a day-rate engagement can reach five figures before you have anything working: often documents, workshops and a roadmap. That can be good value if the roadmap is good, but it is a real commitment before you have proof the approach works.
What fixed-fee looks like instead
A fixed-fee AI consultancy prices the outcome, not the hours. Scope is agreed in writing before work starts, and the price stays the same however many days the work takes. The incentive flips: the firm now wants to deliver efficiently, because the fee does not grow if the work runs long. Our own packages are published: £4,500 for an AI readiness assessment (9 to 14 days), £8,500 for a document-processing proof of concept (3 to 5 weeks) and £15,000 for a production LangGraph agent.
The trade-off worth understanding
Fixed-fee only works when the scope is genuinely well-defined. A vague, open-ended transformation programme is not a good fit for a fixed price, and any firm quoting one for that kind of engagement is either padding the number heavily or planning to renegotiate scope halfway through. The honest use case for fixed-fee is a specific, well-bounded problem: one workflow automated, one proof of concept built, one readiness assessment delivered. For genuinely open-ended, multi-year transformation work, a different commercial structure is usually more honest for both sides.
What to ask a prospective AI consultancy
Ask what happens if the engagement runs over. A day-rate firm bills you more. A fixed-fee firm absorbs it, which is precisely why a fixed-fee firm scopes carefully before committing to a number, rather than after. If a consultancy will not give you a fixed price for a well-defined deliverable, that itself is worth treating as information.
How much does an AI consultancy cost in the UK?
For a defined piece of work in 2026, expect roughly £4,500 to £15,000 at a boutique on fixed fees, or £450 to £1,800 a day on day rates, which adds up quickly over a multi-week project. Large consultancies are usually higher and rarely publish prices. The cheapest way to start is a scoped assessment or proof of concept, not a transformation programme.
Where this fits for clients
This is how we price everything at Kelriva: three fixed-fee packages, each scoped in writing before work starts, with no day rates and no retainer. All three are on our pricing page. If you are comparing quotes and one of them is a fixed number with a defined deliverable, that is usually the easier one to say yes to.