What an AI Readiness Assessment Should Cost You, and What It Should Not

Ask three AI consulting shops what a readiness assessment costs and you will get numbers that differ by two orders of magnitude for what is, on paper, the same deliverable: a report that tells you whether your business is ready to use AI. Aries Consulting Group prices a narrow small-business tier at $2,000 to $8,000 for companies under roughly $2 million in revenue, rising to $5,000 to $15,000 for the $2 million to $50 million range. The AI Consulting Network lands in the same $2,000 to $8,000 band for a two to four week engagement. ConsultKit's own market breakdown runs a wider range, $1,500 to $3,000 at the entry tier and up past $200,000 for multi-department enterprise work. None of these three publish independent survey data behind their numbers. They are rate cards from firms selling the service, not a benchmarking study, and I am telling you that plainly because it matters for what comes next.

Here is my position: pay for the cheap, narrow version. Skip the expensive one, at least at first.

The honest case against paying for any of this goes like this. A readiness assessment is mostly interviews and a slide deck built from what your own people tell a consultant about your own data and your own team. You already have that information. A short, real pilot with actual users produces more truthful readiness data than a week of structured interviews, because a pilot fails on the specific thing that would have failed anyway, instead of a general risk score nobody can act on. And there is a real incentive problem: the same firms selling assessments are usually selling the much bigger engagement behind it. The AI Consulting Network's own published ladder runs from a $2,000 to $8,000 assessment, to an $8,000 to $25,000 strategy and roadmap, to a $15,000 to $50,000 pilot, to $50,000 to $150,000-plus for full implementation. The report is not the product. It is the first rung of the ladder.

That case is real, and I have seen it play out with consultants who write a readiness score that conveniently recommends their own three-phase engagement. But it does not mean the exercise is worthless, because self-assessment has its own well-documented blind spot: the people grading their own readiness are the same people whose job depends on the answer being reasonably good. Deloitte's 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report, based on a survey of 3,235 leaders across 24 countries conducted in August and September 2025, found that confidence is unevenly distributed. Leaders feel strongly prepared on strategy but consistently weaker on the parts that actually sink AI projects: infrastructure, data quality, risk governance, and talent. Only 34 percent say they are truly rebuilding how the business works around AI rather than bolting it onto existing processes, and 53 percent name raising basic AI fluency across the workforce as the top thing they still have to do. That is a real, externally measured gap between how ready people feel and how ready their operations are, and it is exactly the kind of blind spot an outside, scoped look is built to catch cheaply, before you have committed real money to a bigger build.

So the math I would actually run: a two to four week assessment at $2,000 to $8,000, aimed at one specific business question, is cheap insurance against a $50,000-plus pilot going sideways for a reason a week of real diligence would have surfaced. That price only holds if you keep it narrow. The moment a proposal grows into a multi-month "discovery" phase before anyone will estimate what implementation costs, you have stopped buying a decision and started prepaying for a relationship.

What to ask for, concretely: one business question stated up front, a two to four week cap, and a written recommendation that says go, do not go, or go smaller, with a rough cost for the next step attached. Nothing else belongs in scope. That is the shape of the assessment work we do at Mojo AI Services, and it is the standard I would hold any firm to before signing. If you want a second opinion on a proposal that has already landed on your desk, that conversation is free. Get in touch.