What does an AI orchestration engagement cost?

What actually drives the number

Four things move the price of a deep dive, and they are worth knowing before you ask any firm for a quote, because they are the variables you control.

• The number of processes in scope. One end-to-end process is a contained piece of work. Four processes across three teams is a different engagement, not a bigger version of the same one.
• How many systems the process crosses. Each additional system adds discovery, and systems nobody can currently describe add the most.
• How many people must be interviewed. Process maps are built from the people doing the work, and that time is the largest single input.
• Whether the output has to survive a board or a regulator. Work that will be scrutinised externally carries evidence requirements that internal planning does not.

Why there is no rate card

A published day rate answers a question nobody actually has. What a buyer wants to know is what this will cost for their business, and a day rate converts to that only once the scope is known — at which point the day rate has told them nothing the fixed price would not.

Fixed-price proposals also place the estimation risk on the firm doing the estimating, which is where it belongs. If a deep dive takes longer than scoped, that is a scoping error, and the client should not be the one who pays for it.

What is included

A deep dive delivers a written roadmap covering a complete process map of current operations, a prioritised list of AI opportunities with ROI estimates and implementation effort, a risk assessment for each recommendation, a recommended technology stack per opportunity, an implementation timeline with resource requirements, change management considerations, and a measurement framework so the thesis can be proved or disproved afterwards.

The roadmap is deliberately portable. The technology recommendations are specific enough to take to any implementation partner, including one that is not NTDG. A roadmap that only works if its author builds it is a sales document.

Comparing quotes across firms

Three questions separate comparable quotes from incomparable ones. Ask each firm whether the price is fixed or an estimate. Ask whether the deliverable names specific technologies or stays at the level of capability themes. And ask whether you can execute the roadmap with a different partner — the answer reveals whether you are buying advice or an option on a build.

Implementation is quoted separately. Where a client wants NTDG to build what the roadmap recommends, that runs either as a short strategic sprint focused on a single opportunity, or as a longer partnership with the team embedded in operations as the technology matures. Keeping the two commercially separate is what allows the roadmap to recommend against building something.

How to get a number

Send an outline of your operations — the process you are worried about, roughly how many people touch it, and which systems it crosses. A fixed-price proposal comes back within three business days. There is no charge for the proposal and no obligation attached to it.