AI readiness assessment: what you should get for the money

A fixed-price AI readiness assessment costs USD 2,500 to 10,000 and takes three days to eight weeks; a consultancy programme is quoted at USD 50,000 to 500,000 over three to six months. Whatever you pay, it should give you five things, and the most useful of them is a verdict per role with the human share written next to it.

What do the three price levels deliver?

Two notes on the table. Enterprise workforce tools sit outside it: Draup, for example, offers a free 14-day "board-ready AI transformation roadmap" and scores tasks as automate, augment or human, but its worked examples are large organisations (Draup). In Germany the BAFA programme pays small and medium-sized companies 50 percent of up to EUR 3,500 of consulting cost, for up to two consultations a year and five in total, until 31 December 2026 (BAFA; IHK Nürnberg), which halves the bill at the first price level.

What must any assessment contain?

1. A task list per role, with hours. Not a list of use cases. The public occupational database holds 18,838 task statements under an open licence (O*NET); an assessment that starts from your job descriptions and maps them to it can be checked line by line.
2. A split of every task into three classes: AI runs it, AI drafts and a person finishes, stays with people. The method should be public. The exposure rubric from Eloundou and colleagues, which asks whether a language model can halve the time for a task at the same quality, is published (arXiv); the observed-usage data in Anthropic's Economic Index (Hugging Face) and the Microsoft applicability scores for 785 occupations (GitHub) are free downloads. If the assessor cannot name the method, you are buying an opinion.
3. The cost of each role from official statistics, with employer costs. In the United States, median pay comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and employer costs add about 43 percent on top of wages (BLS ECEC). An assessment that uses your payroll instead is fine; one that uses neither is guessing.
4. The tool that could take the automatable share, and its published price at your volume. Without this line the saving cannot be computed.
5. A verdict per role: go or no-go, the human share that remains, a confidence level and the legal flag for your country. The roles that do not qualify belong in the report too.

How do you read a per-role verdict?

Read the confidence level first. A high verdict means your own volumes confirmed the split and at least two public signals agree; a medium one rests on public data for the role type; a low one rests on an interview. Then read the published range as a ceiling, never as a promise: 76 percent of support conversations resolved is a vendor average across more than 12,000 customers (Fin), not your number until a pilot measures it. Then read the human share. Every role that qualifies keeps a person for exceptions, sign-off or the desk itself; if the share is written as zero, the assessment is selling, not assessing. Finally, check that the verdict is about the role and its tasks, not about the person who holds it. That is what keeps the decision with you and, in Europe, outside the high-risk rules of the AI Act.