What a $2,500 AI Pilot Actually Includes

Quick Answer

A fixed-price AI pilot should buy a written problem charter, a working MVP on your real data, a business case and a plan to adopt it, delivered in weeks. Analytics AIML’s entry prices are AIMSolve from $2,500, AIMContext from $3,500 and AIMGrowth from $1,500. Platform consumption and larger migrations sit outside those prices.

• Cost: entry prices are floors, not totals; scope sets the final number.
• Effort: AIMSolve ships a production-ready MVP in one to two weeks.
• Risk: the 60-Day Ship Guarantee applies to Sprint engagements.
• Fit: one bounded workflow, one owner, data you can already reach.

Most published AI pilot cost figures are ranges wide enough to be useless, because nobody says what the money buys. A pilot price only means something when it is itemised: the scope, the deliverables, the calendar and the line where the fixed price stops. This article does that for our own entry offers, so a buyer can compare any proposal against a concrete list.

Governance is usually the missing line item. The Retool AI Governance Report 2026, a May 2026 survey of 307 senior technology and security leaders, found 19% of companies with 200 to 999 employees had no formal AI governance approach at all. A pilot that ignores access, logging and ownership produces a demo that cannot be promoted, however cheap it was.

The practical problem for a mid-market buyer is not finding someone to build a prototype. It is knowing whether the pilot will produce something that survives contact with production data, security review and the team that has to use it on Monday.

Why Do Cheap Pilots Stall After the Demo?

A low price is not the problem. A pilot with no defined end state is. These failures compound in this order.

1. The scope is a technology, not a workflow. “Try a chatbot” has no finish line, so the pilot ends when the budget does.
2. The demo runs on sample data. A prototype fed a cleaned extract looks great until it meets the real source with its duplicates and missing fields.
3. Security review arrives last. Nobody asked who may see what, so the MVP fails access review and goes back to the start.
4. No baseline was taken. Without a before number there is no business case, so nobody funds the next phase.
5. The users were never consulted. The tool works, the team keeps the old spreadsheet, and adoption quietly reaches zero.

Every item in the itemised list below exists to block one of these.

What Do the Three Entry Offers Cost?

These are the published starting prices from our home page. Each is a fixed-scope sprint aimed at one working artifact.

The rest of this article itemises AIMSolve, the $2,500 entry point, because it is the offer most buyers mean when they ask about AI pilot cost. AIMContext follows the same shape with a data foundation on the lakehouse as its core deliverable.

What Does the $2,500 Buy, Item by Item?

AIMSolve runs the five phases of our AIM-IT Playbook. Each phase has a named output, so you can check delivery against a list rather than a feeling.

1. Assess: the AI Opportunity Charter. One document naming the workflow, the owner, the baseline measure, the target, the data sources and what is out of scope. If we cannot write a measurable baseline, the pilot stops here, which is cheaper than finding out in week six.
2. Innovate: the Solution Hypothesis Map. The candidate ways to fix the workflow, with the process changes separated from the automation. Often the biggest gain is a step removed, not a model added.
3. Model: a working prototype and business case. The MVP built on your real data, with the business case stated in the baseline measure from the charter, not in adjectives.
4. Implement: the Adoption and Workflow Plan. Who uses it, what changes in their day, what training they get and what happens to the old way of working.
5. Track: the KPI dashboard and improvement loop. The measure from the charter, tracked after go-live, with a named owner and a trigger for when performance drifts.

That last item is the one most pilots skip. Without it, nobody can say six months later whether the pilot worked. The discipline comes from Frank “Rio” Shines’ 30+ years implementing enterprise systems inside IBM, Ernst & Young, Johnson & Johnson and McKesson, and from Lean Six Sigma practice at Master Black Belt level: measure first, automate second, and leave a control plan behind.

How Does the Calendar Run?

A one-to-two week sprint only works if the waiting is removed before day one. The table shows the order we work in; exact days move with access and the size of the workflow.

Our AI pilot to production checklist covers what has to be true before an MVP like this is promoted beyond its first users.

What Sits Outside the Fixed Price?

A fixed price is honest only if the exclusions are stated up front. These are the items that drive the final number or sit on a different invoice.

• Platform consumption. Cloud, Databricks compute and model API usage are billed by those providers, not by us. They are usually small during a pilot and worth estimating before production.
• Additional source systems. Each extra system adds connection, mapping and testing work. A pilot scoped to one or two sources stays near the entry price.
• Larger migrations. Moving a warehouse to a lakehouse, or re-platforming several pipelines, is quoted after an assessment, because an honest number needs to see your sources first.
• Enterprise rollout. Scaling from the pilot users to every team, with change management across departments, is a follow-on phase.
• Your team’s time. The sprint needs a decision-maker and a few users. If they are unavailable, the calendar slips, whatever the price.

On delivery risk, the home page states the 60-Day Ship Guarantee plainly: “On every Sprint engagement: if we don’t deliver the agreed working artifact in 60 days, you don’t pay the final invoice.” The phrase that matters is “agreed working artifact,” which is why the charter in step one is written before anything is built.

Why Is AIMContext Priced Higher?

AIMContext starts at $3,500 because its deliverable is a data foundation, not only an application. An assistant that answers from company data needs those answers to come from governed gold tables: ingestion from source, cleaning in silver, a conformed gold layer, access rules and lineage. On Databricks, Unity Catalog captures lineage automatically, which is what lets you show where an answer came from.

That foundation is reusable. The second and third assistants built on the same lakehouse cost less, because the expensive part, trustworthy data, already exists. A pilot that skips it is cheaper once and more expensive every time after.

If you are weighing fixed-price work against time and materials more generally, our post on fixed-price AI consulting sets out where each model fits.

When Should You Fix the Process Before Paying for Any Pilot?

Sometimes the right AI pilot cost is zero, because the workflow is not ready. These signals tell you to stop and fix the process first.

• Nobody can state the baseline. If you cannot say how long the task takes today, or how often it goes wrong, no pilot can prove it improved anything.
• Three teams describe the workflow three ways. Automating a process with no agreed definition encodes one team’s version and breaks the others.
• The data lives in personal spreadsheets. If the inputs are copied by hand from silos each week, the first job is a governed source, not a model.
• There is no owner after go-live. A pilot with no one accountable for the KPI becomes shelfware within a quarter.
• The goal is “use AI.” A technology goal with no business measure attached is a request for a demo, not a pilot.

If two or more of those are true, start with the process work and the data foundation. When you are ready to compare scope and prices across our offers, the full list is on our services page.

The NIST AI Risk Management Framework makes a similar point in its own vocabulary: map the context and owners before you measure and manage the system. It is voluntary, but a pilot built that way passes security review faster.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How much does an AI pilot cost?

It depends on scope, data access and how much of the result must be production-ready. Our published entry prices are AIMSolve from $2,500, AIMContext from $3,500 and AIMGrowth from $1,500, each a fixed-scope sprint. Platform usage is billed separately by the platform provider.

How long does a fixed-price AI pilot take?

AIMSolve ships a production-ready MVP in one to two weeks, AIMContext a knowledge foundation in 14 days and AIMGrowth an MVP in 7 to 14 days. Access delays are the most common reason a calendar slips.

Is a $2,500 pilot a prototype or production-ready?

The stated deliverable is a production-ready MVP for one bounded workflow, plus the charter, business case, adoption plan and KPI tracking. Scaling it across the company is a follow-on phase with its own scope.

What happens if the pilot does not deliver?

Under the 60-Day Ship Guarantee, if the agreed working artifact is not delivered in 60 days on a Sprint engagement, you do not pay the final invoice. That is why the artifact is defined in writing in the charter.

Do we need Databricks to run a pilot?

No. AIMSolve works on the systems you have. AIMContext builds a governed data foundation and is often done on a Databricks lakehouse, but the method applies to your existing stack too.

Can we start without committing to a pilot?

Yes. The home page offers a free 30-minute live diagnostic, the AI Flight Recorder, which ends with a one-page red, yellow and green scorecard. It is a reasonable way to test whether a pilot is the right next step.