AI Discovery Engagement Cost · Calculator Part of the AI Discovery Playbook

The Discovery
Tax You're
Paying.

How much of that consultancy discovery fee is buying intellectual cover versus delivering a decision? Enter your engagement numbers and find out what running the same 10-move discovery in-house with Claude actually costs.

Enter your numbers ↓

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Your engagement

edit to recalculate

Consultancy engagement

Discovery engagement fee Total billed for the discovery phase (USD)

Engagement duration Calendar weeks to complete discovery

Workflows / functions in scope Number of processes being assessed

In-house alternative

Internal team time cost Transformation lead + architect, part-time (USD)

Claude seat / Team plan cost Annual Claude subscription cost (USD)

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The ledger

live

Consultancy discovery cost

$1,000,000

$40,000 per workflow

In-house discovery cost

$60,300

$2,412 per workflow

Amount reclaimed

$939,700

94% of the engagement fee

Time comparison — consultancy vs in-house estimate

Consultancy

16 weeks

In-house

~3 weeks

16 weeks compressed to about 3 weeks — an estimate based on running the 10-move discovery loop with Claude iteratively over 2–4 weeks.

5-year reclaimed (annual re-run)

$4,698,500

If discovery is refreshed each year at the same consultancy rate

Estimate — read before using

Estimate only. This compares the cost of the discovery phase — the first 60 to 70 percent of a typical AI transformation engagement. The real cost and the real work is execution and change management, which neither a consultancy deck nor a prompt removes. The fit scores and risk heatmap are decision-support; a named executive owns the decision to fund pilots, and a real AI governance program (NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001) is required before any build. Validate against your own engagement quotes.

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The read

Calculating…

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Source tape

4 entries

McKinsey Global Institute / Gartner AI discovery benchmarks — Industry estimates for large-enterprise AI discovery engagements typically range $500k–$2M for 12–20 week scopes covering 20–40 workflows. Midpoint used as default.
Anthropic Claude Team plan pricing — $25–$30/user/month as of 2025. Annual seat cost $300 used as conservative single-seat floor.
Internal resource cost benchmark — A part-time transformation lead + solutions architect over a 4-week sprint: $60k represents roughly 30–40% of fully-loaded annual salary for two mid-senior roles over the discovery window.
Time-to-insight compression, LLM-assisted discovery — Structured prompt-driven discovery loops (interview synthesis, capability mapping, risk heatmap) have been completed in 2–4 weeks in practitioner case studies vs. 12–20 weeks for consultant-led equivalents. In-house estimate shown as indicative range.