Guide
What is an AI readiness assessment?
The name covers at least three different products, which is why quotes for it range from nothing to fifty thousand dollars. Before you buy one, find out which of the three you're being offered.
The three things sold under this name
- A security and permissions review. Can your systems safely have AI pointed at them. Who can see what, what's overshared, which accounts are dormant. Usually sold by whoever manages your computers, often free, and genuinely worth doing.
- A scored questionnaire. You fill in a short questionnaire and get a number and a chart. Free, quick, and mostly a conversation starter. A score of 3.4 out of 5 doesn't tell you what to do.
- A workflow diagnosis. Somebody sits with you, watches how the work actually moves, then tells you what to switch on, what to buy, what to build, and what to leave alone. This is the one that produces decisions, and it's the one that costs money.
All three are legitimate. They answer different questions, and one can't stand in for another.
What they cost
For a small business, published prices for the workflow kind mostly run from about $750 to $7,500. Under about $1,500 buys roughly a day of someone's time. The most common range, $2,500 to $5,000, typically buys about two weeks, several interviews and a report of fifteen to twenty-five pages.
Above roughly $10,000 you're generally buying a firm rather than a person, and the work is aimed at organizations much larger than a twenty-person practice.
Prices checked September 2026 across publicly published rates. Many firms don't publish at all.
How to tell which one you're being offered
- Ask what the deliverable is. A score, or a document naming specific products and settings? Those are different purchases.
- Ask whether "do nothing" is a possible finding. If not, it's a sales process with a report attached.
- Ask how many hours of your time it needs. Anything serious needs two to three hours of yours. Anything that needs none of your time is a questionnaire.
- Ask who wrote it and who reads it. One person, or a team with a template?
- Ask whether they'll need access to your data. Some do. That isn't automatically wrong, but it changes the paperwork and the timeline a lot.
Whether you need one at all
Two cases where you probably don't. If somebody in your firm is genuinely keeping track of what your software ships and deciding what to adopt, you don't need an outsider. And if you already know exactly what you want built, you want a builder and some quotes, not a diagnosis.
The case where it's worth money is narrower: you're paying for software you suspect you're under-using, nobody has time to work out what it does, and the advice available to you is coming from people who are selling something.
That last case is the one we built this for
A fixed fee, three sessions, and a written report. If you should spend nothing, that's what it says.