Is AI consulting worth it?
Only when it is tied to specific business outcomes instead of open-ended experiments. If you cannot say what success looks like before the engagement starts, you are paying for someone else to learn.
The math on AI consulting is simple. If a $10,000 engagement removes 10 hours per week of manual work, at a blended labour cost of $50 per hour, that is $26,000 per year in recovered time. Most engagements that are scoped well pay back within months.
Where it stops being worth it: when the consultant wants to run pilots without a clear picture of what gets deployed, when nobody internally owns the work after the consultant leaves, or when data quality is so poor that any AI output is unreliable.
A strong consultant will tell you when not to hire them. That is usually the signal you want to hire them.
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Signal & Form helps Canadian businesses move from curiosity to working AI systems.
Related questions
How much does an AI consultant cost?
In Canada, small assessments start around $1,500 to $5,000. Implementation projects run $5,000 to $25,000. Enterprise engagements go $25,000 to $100,000 and up. Ongoing retainers sit between $2,000 and $10,000 a month.
Why do 85% of AI projects fail?
Not because the models do not work. Because objectives are fuzzy, data foundations are weak, nobody owns the project after the pilot, and change management gets skipped.
What is a reasonable consulting fee?
Reasonable fees are ones where the expected value clearly exceeds the cost and the scope is spelled out up front. Anchor the fee to outcomes, not hours.
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