What an AI Readiness Assessment Costs: 2026 Prices, From Free to Enterprise

The cost of an AI readiness assessment runs from nothing to $55,000 among the providers that publish a price, and large consulting firms such as PwC and Deloitte publish no price at all. Free self-assessments cost you time. Fixed-fee assessments from specialist firms start at $1,499 for a small business and reach $22,000 for a focused two-week review. Multi-stakeholder enterprise assessments with a published price sit at $45,000 to $55,000.

Every AI readiness assessment cost on this page comes from the provider’s own website, read in September 2026 and linked where it appears. Where a provider does not publish a price, we say so instead of repeating somebody else’s estimate.

Price is the easy half. The harder half is what the money buys, because the assessments in this range look at different evidence.

A questionnaire scores the answers you give it. An interview-based assessment scores what your managers believe. Very few look at the work itself, and if you are holding a headcount or automation number, the work itself is what that number rests on.

Key Takeaways

• Published prices for an AI readiness assessment run from $0 for a self-assessment to between $45,000 and $55,000 for a multi-stakeholder enterprise engagement, with fixed-fee specialist work at $1,499 to $22,000 in between.
• PwC and Deloitte describe their AI readiness work on their own sites without a price, so any figure you have seen for a large-firm assessment came from a proposal or a third party’s estimate.
• Scope sets the price: respondents, locations, stakeholders, and how deep the review of systems and processes goes.
• Method is the variable price tables leave out. Most assessments score self-reported answers or interviews, which shows whether AI can run in your environment rather than which work it should take over.
• Free self-assessments, scored against evidence, tell you which kind of paid assessment you need before anyone sends you a proposal.

AI Readiness Assessment Cost at a Glance

Two things to keep in mind when reading it. A Microsoft 365 review and an enterprise maturity assessment answer different questions, so compare what each one answers before you compare what it costs. And every figure is a starting point or a band, because each provider says scope sets the final number.

If you are still choosing between categories of tool rather than between providers, our guide to AI readiness assessment tools compares them by what each one measures.

Free Self-Assessments: What They Cost and What They Can Tell You

A self-assessment costs an hour or two of honest thinking, and the good ones repay it. Microsoft’s AI Readiness Wizard asks 10 questions, starting with business strategy, then technology and data strategy, then suggests the next area to focus on and a few resources to get started.

Some firms also give away a version of paid work as a first step. Netrix Global currently offers its data and AI readiness assessment free for a limited time, describes it as normally a $2,500 engagement running two to three weeks, and says that where it makes sense to go further, it can put together a proposal. That is a reasonable offer. It is also the first conversation with a firm that sells the next phase, and it helps to walk in knowing that.

Our own AI Readiness Scorecard for Operations is free and is not gated behind an email address. You score one operational area at a time, such as claims processing or loan operations, on 24 criteria across six dimensions: process visibility, data ground truth, volume and variability, exception rates and judgment intensity, workforce knowledge concentration, and compliance and risk constraints. Each criterion scores 0, 1, or 2, for a total out of 48. Any single dimension at 3 or less caps the verdict, whatever the total says.

What a free self-assessment can tell you before you pay anyone

• Which operation is the strongest candidate for AI, and which is not worth assessing yet.
• Where your weakest dimension sits, which decides what kind of paid help makes sense.
• Whether your answers rest on evidence or on belief. The scorecard awards a 2 only when you could put the evidence in front of your board this week.

What it cannot tell you

It cannot check your answers. Every free tool scores what you tell it.

The scorecard itself warns that even operations in its top band tend to over-score data ground truth, because self-reported data quality is the hardest thing to judge about yourself. A self-assessment tells you where to look. It does not tell you what you will find there.

Fixed-Fee Assessments From Specialist Firms: $1,499 to $22,000

Most of the published prices we found sit in this band, and the spread is mostly scope.

At the small-business end, BlueShore.AI prices its AI readiness assessment from $1,499 per engagement. That buys two to three days with at least one day on-site, covering current processes, the technology stack, team capability, and use cases, and it ends in a written report with prioritized recommendations. BlueShore builds it for small and medium businesses and says the final price depends on business size, number of locations, and how deep the process and stack review goes.

Earley Information Science publishes three tiers, which makes it a useful reference for how price follows depth. Its AI Readiness Quick Check is $2,500 for the first report and $1,000 for each additional one. A single respondent answers 12 questions, and the result is a nine-section analytical report in one to two business days. When two or more people from the same organization take part, a working session with an Earley consultant is included.

Two firms publish prices in the low five figures. WorkWise Solutions includes a single-firm assessment in its AI Readiness Sprint at a $12,500 fixed fee, covering a five-dimension evaluation, stakeholder interviews, gap analysis, and a prioritized action plan. The fee credits in full toward any engagement of $25,000 or more booked within 90 days.

Puget Sound AI prices its Microsoft 365 AI Readiness Review at $12,000 to $22,000 for two weeks. It covers governance gaps, data protection posture, and Copilot readiness, and delivers a prioritized 90-day remediation roadmap. The firm says most reviews land at the lower end of the range, with larger or more complex tenants quoted before work begins.

Those two show why a list of prices only goes so far. The Puget Sound review is a technical check of one platform. The WorkWise sprint is structured to lead into a build, which is good value if you already expect to buy that build from the same firm and worth weighing if you do not.

Enterprise AI Readiness Assessment Pricing, and the Firms That Price by Proposal

Earley’s middle tier puts a published price on an enterprise assessment. Its Enterprise AI Readiness Assessment costs $45,000 to $55,000 over four to six weeks. It is a 74-question, interview-based diagnosis across multiple stakeholders, and it delivers a maturity baseline, a gap analysis report, and a phased remediation roadmap with ownership and sequencing.

The tier above it is worth a look too. Earley’s AI Readiness Architecture Pilot is listed at $100,000 to $150,000 and up, runs 8 to 26 weeks, and is a focused implementation of one priority use case. At Earley, the move past six figures is the point where assessment becomes implementation.

The large consulting firms work differently. PwC describes its AI Readiness Assessment in detail on its own site: senior leader interviews, a 0 to 100 readiness score, 12 enterprise dimensions scored separately, benchmarking against data from more than 500 organizations, and a roadmap covering 90 days, six months, and 12 months. Neither of PwC’s two pages on the assessment lists a price. Deloitte’s GenAI Readiness and Adoption services page does not list one either.

So a dollar figure you have seen for a Big Four AI readiness assessment came from a proposal or from a third party’s estimate. The way to budget for one is to request a scoped proposal and compare what it covers, line by line, with the published tiers above.

What Moves the Price of an AI Readiness Assessment

Read the published pages side by side and the same drivers come up, whoever is selling.

1. How much of the organization is in scope. BlueShore prices by business size and number of locations, Earley charges $1,000 for each additional Quick Check respondent, and Puget Sound AI quotes larger tenants separately.
2. How the evidence is gathered. Earley’s own tiers show the step: 12 questions from one respondent is $2,500, while a 74-question, interview-based assessment across many stakeholders is $45,000 to $55,000.
3. What you get at the end. A scored report sits at the low end of every provider’s range. A phased roadmap with owners and sequencing sits at the high end.
4. Whether the fee leads somewhere. A fee that credits toward a later engagement changes what the assessment is for, and a price that includes implementation, as Earley’s pilot tier does, has stopped being an assessment.
5. People’s time more than software. Assessment software sold to consultants, such as Audity, lists plans from $99 a month, with its Pro tier at $397 a month. A firm’s fee is mostly the hours someone spends interviewing, analyzing, and writing.

The variable most price tables leave out

Most of the assessments above are built around some version of “can AI run here”: is the data governed, is the platform configured, does leadership agree on the goal. Those are real questions. An operations leader with a mandate usually has a narrower one: which work, in which team, can AI take over, and what happens to service levels when it does.

None of the published assessments in the table describes measuring work as it is done. The evidence their pages describe is questionnaires, interviews, and reviews of processes, systems, and documentation. That is why the sixth pillar of operational AI readiness, knowing what your people actually do at the activity level, rarely shows up in a price table. If that is the question in front of you, a 30-minute strategy call is the quickest way to find out whether it needs measuring or whether a cheaper assessment already covers it.

Where Summit Trails Fits, and How It Is Priced

We sit in a different place from everything above, because we measure the work instead of asking about it.

A Phase 1 assessment is a fixed-scope, 90-day engagement for an operation with at least 50 employees in scope. The Ground Truth AI² Platform captures the region around each click on the desktop, never keystrokes or the full screen, then classifies each capture at the activity level and scores each activity for automation potential.

The capture, classify, insight method produces for every person in scope what an analyst would otherwise get by shadowing one employee for weeks. First findings arrive at weeks three to four. The Ground Truth AI² Report at 90 days carries the operational data set, an AI replacement assessment, a prioritized deployment roadmap, and a staffing model analysis, and you can see what that output looks like.

Wendy Kinney leads the operational side, with more than 20 years in workforce operations across AT&T, Boeing, AIG, Nationwide, Farmers, and the State of California. The operation needs to run on Azure or AWS.

On price: a Phase 1 assessment is a base fee plus a per-employee component, and we scope it on a call, because the number of people in scope is what moves it.

It is the wrong purchase in four situations, and it is better to say so here than on a call.

• You want a first look at no cost. Use the scorecard.
• Your question is Microsoft 365 governance or Copilot configuration. A platform review like the one priced above fits it better.
• Your operation is a contact center. A contact center workforce management suite is built for that work.
• You want AI implemented after the assessment. Implementation is not part of the engagement.

How to Budget Before a Proposal Arrives

Here is a worked example. It is illustrative and describes no real client.

A vice president of claims operations is asked to show what share of a 120-person claims team’s work AI could absorb before the next budget cycle. IT suggests a platform readiness review. A consultancy offers a strategy assessment. Neither quote says what the team actually spends its day doing.

She scores claims processing on the free scorecard in an afternoon. Two dimensions score well: volume and variability, and compliance and risk constraints. Process visibility and data ground truth come in at 3 each, which caps the verdict, and it is the pattern the scorecard describes as the most common one: an operation that knows its volumes and its rules but not its work.

That result tells her what not to buy: a platform review would confirm what IT already knows, and an interview-based assessment would ask her managers the same questions she could not answer with evidence. The gap is measurement of the work, so that is the conversation she budgets for.

The same sequence works for any operation.

1. Score one operation on the free scorecard, against evidence rather than instinct.
2. Look at your lowest dimension before your total.
3. Match the gap to the type of assessment. Governance or platform gaps suit a technical review. A low score on process visibility or data ground truth means the work needs measuring, and another questionnaire will not supply that.
4. Ask every provider the same four questions: what evidence the score rests on, what the price includes and what costs extra, whether the fee credits toward anything later, and who does the work.
5. Take the board the cost of getting the decision wrong alongside the fee. Our guide to the AI readiness assessment business case covers how to frame that.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does an AI readiness assessment cost?

Among providers that publish prices, from $0 for a self-assessment to between $45,000 and $55,000 for a multi-stakeholder enterprise assessment. Specialist fixed-fee work falls in between: BlueShore.AI from $1,499, the Earley Information Science Quick Check at $2,500, the WorkWise Solutions sprint at $12,500, and the Puget Sound AI Microsoft 365 review at $12,000 to $22,000. PwC and Deloitte do not publish a price.

What can a free AI readiness assessment tell me before I pay for one?

It can tell you which operation to look at, which dimension is weakest, and whether your answers are backed by evidence. That is enough to decide what kind of paid assessment you need, or whether you need one yet. It cannot verify anything you tell it, so treat the result as a map of where to look. The Summit Trails scorecard asks for no email address.

What does a Big Four AI readiness assessment cost?

There is no published figure to quote. PwC’s pages on its AI Readiness Assessment describe senior leader interviews, a 0 to 100 score across 12 dimensions, and a roadmap out to 12 months, with no price, and Deloitte’s GenAI readiness services page lists none either. Request a scoped proposal and compare its contents with the published tiers from specialist firms.

How long does an AI readiness assessment take?

Published timelines range from one to two business days for Earley’s Quick Check report, two to three days for BlueShore.AI, and two weeks for Puget Sound AI’s review, up to four to six weeks for Earley’s enterprise assessment. A Summit Trails Phase 1 assessment runs a fixed 90 days, with first findings at weeks three to four.

Why do AI readiness assessment prices vary so much?

Scope, method, and deliverable all change between them. Price rises with the number of people and locations in scope and with the move from a questionnaire to interviews, and a phased roadmap with owners costs more than a scored report. Two assessments at very different prices are often answering two different questions.

How is a Summit Trails assessment priced?

As a base fee plus a per-employee component, scoped on a 30-minute call. The number of employees in scope is what moves the cost, the minimum is 50 in one operation, and the engagement runs a fixed 90 days.

Know What You Are Buying Before the Proposal Lands

Finding the price of an AI readiness assessment takes an afternoon once you know where to look. Finding one whose evidence holds up when somebody challenges the number you took to the board takes more care.

If a mandate is already on your desk, start with how to respond to an AI headcount mandate. If you want to know what measuring your own operation would involve for your scope, book a 30-minute strategy call. We will ask what decision you are facing, how many people it touches, and whether the free scorecard would answer it without us.

Measure twice. Cut once.