Commercial / 6 min read
How to price an AI pilot honestly
A number quoted before the problem is understood is either padded or wrong. There is a way to give a buyer certainty without pretending to knowledge nobody has yet.
Time and materials transfers the risk to the buyer
Under a day-rate arrangement, the supplier's learning curve is billable and uncertainty is profitable. Buyers know this, which is why day-rate proposals attract procurement scrutiny that outlasts the work itself.
Fixed price transfers estimation risk to the supplier, where it belongs — the supplier has done this before and the buyer has not. The condition is that the scope is written down precisely enough for both sides to recognise when it has changed.
Price the decision, not the deliverable
A pilot exists to make one decision cheaply: do we invest further, or stop? Price it as the cost of reaching that decision with confidence. That framing keeps pilots short, keeps scope honest, and gives the buyer a clean exit that does not read as failure.
It also disciplines the supplier. If the pilot cannot reach the decision inside the fee, the scope is wrong and should be cut before the contract, not renegotiated during it.
What belongs in the quote
A written outcome statement. A list of what is explicitly out of scope — longer than the in-scope list, usually. Named decision gates with dates. The data and access required from the buyer, with the date they are needed, because supplier delay caused by missing access is the most common source of dispute.
Running costs stated separately from build costs. Model inference, infrastructure and third-party licences are the buyer's ongoing liability and should never be discovered after go-live.
Change is a conversation before it is an invoice
Scope will change; the question is only whether it changes visibly. Agree in advance that any change is raised, priced and accepted in writing before work on it starts.
The supplier who absorbs small changes silently is not being generous — they are building a grievance that surfaces at the worst moment. Written, unremarkable change control protects the relationship far more than goodwill does.
If this is the kind of thinking you want applied to your own operation, a first conversation costs nothing.
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