How much does AI automation cost?
A first automated workflow starts around $5,000 for a small or mid-sized business and rises with the number of systems it touches. A readiness check should cost you nothing; a quantified process audit is paid and refundable if the answer is no-build. Enterprise transformation programs are a different market — six and seven figures.
What actually drives the price
Almost all of the variance comes from integration surface, not from the AI. Automating a process that lives in one system is cheap. The same process spread across a CRM, a mailbox, a spreadsheet, and a messenger costs several times more, because most of the work is making four systems agree on what a record is.
The other three multipliers: data that has to be cleaned before anything can run on it, decisions that need a human approval step wired in, and whether you need monitoring and documentation at the end or just something that works today.
What should be free, and what should not
Two different things get called diagnostics, and only one of them should be free. A readiness check — is this process even a candidate, roughly where the hours go — costs you nothing anywhere competent; ours takes fifteen minutes and needs no access to your systems. A quantified process audit is not that: five days, real access, a swimlane map with throughput and error rate on every handoff, and a cost-of-chaos figure your controller signs off on. That is engineering, it is paid, and it should be refundable in full when the audit ends in a no-build.
The thing to walk away from is a four- or five-figure discovery phase that ends in a document, refunds nothing, and builds nothing. The test is not the price tag — it is what you are holding at the end and what happens if the honest answer turns out to be no.
Beyond that, expect to pay for the build, the integrations, and the handover. Those are real engineering too.
How to sanity-check a quote
Ask for the ROI arithmetic behind the number — hours saved per week, multiplied by loaded cost, against the build price. If a vendor cannot produce that on one page, they have not scoped the process, they have scoped a budget.
Then ask what happens after handover: who can change the automation in six months, and what it costs. A cheap build with no documentation is the expensive option on a two-year view.
Related questions
- Is there a minimum budget for AI automation?
- Practically, yes. Below roughly $5,000 there is not enough engineering time to integrate, test, and hand over a process that revenue depends on. Under that threshold you are buying a script, which can be the right call for a single isolated task.
- Why do quotes for the same project vary so much?
- Usually because the two vendors scoped different things. One priced a working integrated process with monitoring and handover; the other priced a proof of concept. Compare what is in production at the end, not the headline number.
- Should we pay for a discovery phase?
- Depends what you get and what happens if the answer is no. A paid audit that produces a quantified process map, a cost-of-chaos number and a signed ROI estimate — refunded if the math says do not build — is worth it, and paying tends to be what gets you the real process owner in the room instead of the BD-friendly one. A standalone discovery contract that ends in a strategy deck, refunds nothing and builds nothing is how months disappear.
Related
Free AI Diagnostic
The free diagnostics puts a number on your own processes — hours lost per week and what recovering them is worth — before you commit to anything.
Start the free diagnosticStarts immediately in the browser.
- Fee
- Free
- Length
- 15 minutes
You keep the ranked list of candidates either way.