How much does AI consultancy and training cost in the UK (2026)
In 2026, independent AI consultants in the UK charge roughly £500–£1,200 a day, with London contract roles advertised at £725–£850. Team AI training runs from about £1,000 for a single day to £12,000 for a two-day department intensive. Fixed-price programmes that combine an audit, training and a first automation start around £12,500.
What do AI consultants charge per day in the UK?
Most AI consultancy in the UK is still sold by the day. The figures below come from two kinds of source: published job adverts, which show what organisations actually agree to pay, and price guides published by consultancies themselves, which show what they ask for.
- Contract roles in London: an AI cloud consultant role advertised through Hays on the government’s Find a Job service paid £750–£850 a day for a six-month discovery and governance engagement; an AI lead role advertised by Morgan Hunt paid up to £725 a day inside IR35 for a 12-week assignment.
- Independent consultants: UK consultancy price guides commonly quote £500–£900 a day for mid-level and £800–£1,200 for senior AI consultants, with London 10–20% above regional rates.
- Large firms: Big Four and specialist AI consultancies sit well above that, typically in four figures a day per consultant, with data and cloud work billed separately.
Day rates are the least useful number to compare. A day rate tells you what an hour of someone’s time costs; it says nothing about how many days the work needs, or whether anything is running in production at the end.
How much does AI training cost?
Training is priced in three ways, and the unit matters more than the number.
- Per day, per group: in-person team days are advertised at around £1,049 + VAT for a full day with a group of eight or more, travel included.
- Per programme: consultancies quote around £3,500 for a half-day executive briefing and around £12,000 for a two-day department intensive.
- Per seat: e-learning libraries cost a few pounds to a few tens of pounds per user a month. They build awareness cheaply but rarely change how a team works.
For comparison, our own training is £950 per two-hour session, run as a programme of 6, 8 or up to 13 sessions on the client’s own documents and tasks — £5,700 for six sessions, £7,600 for eight. The difference from a one-day workshop is time between sessions: people try what they learned on real work and come back with questions.
What do audits, pilots and packages cost?
Beyond day rates, most small and mid-sized companies buy one of three fixed-scope things.
- A readiness audit or discovery: typically 1–3 weeks. Ours is £4,500 for two weeks and ends with a process map, a readiness score, 3–4 quick wins and a roadmap.
- An automation pilot: one process — meeting notes into tasks, proposals from transcripts — taken into production. Ours start from £4,000 per process and go live in 1–4 weeks.
- A package: audit, training and the first solutions at a fixed price. Ours are £12,500, £17,500 and from £28,000, paid 70% upfront and 30% on delivery of the working solutions.
A company brain — a knowledge assistant over your Slack, Drive and calls — is a separate line: from £6,000 on ready-made tools, from £18,000 as a custom knowledge graph, with support from £3,500 a month. See the full price list.
What drives the price?
- Data clean-up. Chat history and shared drives are messy. Most of the effort in a knowledge project goes into collecting, cleaning and linking data, not into the model.
- Integrations. Each system the work touches — CRM, call recorder, drive, messenger — adds set-up and testing time.
- Where it runs. Deploying on your own AWS, Google Cloud or Azure account costs more than a vendor’s cloud, and is often worth it for data you can’t send elsewhere.
- Who measures. A project that records the baseline before building and measures after costs a little more and is the only kind you can defend to a board.
What should you ask before comparing quotes?
- What exactly will be running in production at the end, and who owns it?
- What will you measure before you start, and what after?
- What is the fixed fee for the first phase, and what does it produce if we stop there?
- Where will our data be stored, and will you sign a data processing agreement?
- Who on your side does the work — the person in the pitch, or someone else?
A supplier who can answer all five in writing is worth more than a lower day rate.
Questions
Is AI consultancy priced per day or per project?
Both. Contract and independent consultants usually quote day rates; most companies of 10–200 people are better served by a fixed price for a defined first phase, such as an audit or a pilot, with a clear output.
Is AI training priced per person?
Corporate training is usually priced per session or per day for the whole group, not per head. Per-seat pricing mostly applies to e-learning libraries.
Are prices quoted with VAT?
UK B2B consultancy and training are normally quoted net of VAT. Our prices are shown excluding VAT.
- Find a Job (DWP): AI Consultant, £750–£850 per day, Hays, January 2026
- Morgan Hunt: AI Lead, up to £725 per day, June 2026
- Whitehat SEO: Why UK businesses need AI consulting in 2026 (day-rate ranges)
- tutorials.co.uk: in-person team training, £1,049 + VAT per day
- Spicy Advisory: AI training cost UK 2026 (briefing and intensive prices)
How we write these guides: figures about our own work come from before-and-after measurements on client projects (names withheld where under NDA); market figures come from the sources listed, with the date we checked them. Prices exclude VAT.
