What an AI readiness audit costs and what you get
An AI readiness audit for a company of 20–200 people usually takes one to three weeks and costs a few thousand pounds. Ours is £4,500 for two weeks. Whatever you pay, you should end with four things: a process map, a readiness score, a short list of quick wins and a roadmap with expected impact.
Why should an audit come before any build?
Automating a process nobody has mapped or measured produces random bots. An audit is the diagnosis that makes the next step predictable: it shows where the manual load sits, which tasks repeat, where the data lives, and how ready the people are. Without it, every quote for an automation is a guess, because nobody knows the baseline it should beat.
What is inside a good audit?
- A kick-off with leadership to agree goals, success metrics and who to talk to.
- Interviews — 6–7 in-depth one-to-ones in the most willing departments first, then managers in the rest.
- Process mapping by department: tools, hand-offs, points of manual work.
- A readiness survey scoring team knowledge, tool use and process maturity.
- An opportunity matrix ranking automation candidates by effect and effort.
- A roadmap with phases and expected impact, ready to present to a board.
What documents should you get?
- A process map with annotated automation zones.
- A shortlist of 3–4 quick wins you can start immediately.
- A roadmap presentation for leadership.
- If training follows, a brief for a programme adapted to what the audit found.
All four should be yours whether or not you continue with the same supplier. If an audit ends in a sales proposal and nothing you can hand to someone else, it was a sales meeting.
What drives the price of an audit?
The number of interviews and departments, whether sales and finance are included, and whether the readiness survey goes to the whole company or a sample. A two-week audit of two to four departments is the common size for SMEs. Ours is £4,500 for two weeks, and it is included in every package, so it is never paid twice.
What can you do before buying one?
Try the free readiness scorecard: fifteen questions taken from the survey we use in the paid audit. A low score usually means the first money should go on training and basic tooling; a high score means an audit will move straight to pilots.
Questions
How long does an AI readiness audit take?
One to three weeks for most SMEs. Ours takes two.
Can we do it ourselves?
Partly. The scorecard and a list of your ten most repeated tasks get you a long way. What an outside audit adds is interviews people answer more honestly, and a ranking based on what similar projects returned.
Is the audit a commitment to more work?
It shouldn’t be. Ours ends with documents you own; there is no obligation to continue.
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.
