Tenhaw, or someone else.

The six routes a transformation buyer weighs, and the question that comes before all of them: whether to buy a product, build it yourself, or have someone build it with you. Each page says when the alternative is the right answer, because a comparison that concedes nothing is worth nothing.

comparisons that name the situations where you should buy the other route
6 of 6
build, buy, or build it with someone, weighed before you pick any supplier
3 routes
our fixed-price audit, published, against £150k–£500k for a large-firm equivalent
£30k–£90k
to be told on a call if another route fits you better
30 mins

The six comparisons, each argued in full

Each page names the situations in which the alternative is the better buy, and what it costs. Read the one you are weighing.

01

Tenhaw vs Big Four

£150k–£500k audit

Same ambition. Very different delivery model.

Choose them for scale, indemnity cover and board comfort. Choose us for senior operators in your rooms and a contractual exit date.

Read it
02

Tenhaw vs AI boutiques

Cheaper, narrower

Most are strategy firms or build shops. We are neither.

Choose them for a narrowly scoped model build or a vertical specialism. Choose us when the pilots worked and then failed to scale.

Read it
03

Tenhaw vs Offshore partners

¼ to ½ the rate

Cheaper per head, and that is the point of it.

Choose them when the requirement can be written down and cost per head is the constraint. Choose us for the months where nobody can write it down yet.

Read it
04

Tenhaw vs Contractors

£610–£870 a day

Cheaper per day, and right whenever you already have someone to direct them.

Choose them whenever somebody already has the authority and the time to direct them. Choose us when that person is your sponsor and they already have a job.

Read it
05

Tenhaw vs Hiring in-house

£180k–£350k plus fees

You should hire. The question is what happens in the meantime.

You should hire, and recruiting your permanent team is written into our scope. The only question is what happens during the search.

Read it
06

Tenhaw vs Internal taskforce

Effectively free

The cheapest option, and the one that most often stalls at pilot.

Run it first, it is the right first move. Call us at the point where scaling needs authority the taskforce does not have.

Read it
Triage

The six routes, side by side

What each one costs, who actually does the work, the situation in which it beats us, and how easy each one is to get approved. Every line is taken from the comparison page it links to.

Big Four

Typical cost
£150k–£500k for an equivalent audit
Who does the work
A partner sells it, consultants two to eight years into their career deliver it
When it wins
You need hundreds of people across countries, nine-figure indemnity cover, or the board expects the name
Board optics
Immediate. Nobody asks you to defend the name.

AI boutiques

Typical cost
Often cheaper than us for a narrowly scoped piece of work
Who does the work
A strategy bench or an engineering bench, rarely both in one squad
When it wins
You need a specific model built, or deep vertical domain knowledge, and the operating model is not in question
Board optics
Requires a case. An unfamiliar small supplier, same as us.

Offshore partners

Typical cost
A quarter to just over half the same firm's published onshore rate, on its own G-Cloud 14 card
Who does the work
A large offshore bench working from a written specification, across a time-zone gap
When it wins
The scope is specified and stable, you need overnight cover, or you need twenty engineers and to hold them for years
Board optics
Straightforward. A cost saving is the easiest paper anyone writes.

Contractors

Typical cost
Roughly £610 to £870 a day after agency margin, our estimate rather than a published figure
Who does the work
Individuals you brief, sequence, review and re-brief yourself
When it wins
The architecture is settled, you need specific skills, and you can absorb the direction load
Board optics
Neutral. Resource spend rarely reaches a board.

Hiring in-house

Typical cost
£180k–£350k plus equity, with 25 to 30% recruitment fees on top
Who does the work
One permanent hire, three to six months after they start, six to nine months after you open the role
When it wins
You have a credible internal candidate, or your timeline tolerates a six-to-nine month search
Board optics
Neutral. Approving a headcount is routine.

Internal taskforce

Typical cost
Effectively free: people already on your payroll
Who does the work
Part-time enthusiasts from one or two functions, with no mandate to change anyone's job
When it wins
You are still exploring what agents can do, and have not yet hit the scaling wall
Board optics
Neutral. No new money leaves the building.

Tenhaw

Typical cost
£30k–£90k fixed audit, £20k–£55k for a proof of concept
Who does the work
A forward-deployed squad of three senior people, not substituted without your written agreement
When it wins
Pilots worked and then stalled, and scaling now needs roles, decision rights and governance to move
Board optics
Requires a case. We are not a name your board already trusts.
If ours is the row that requires a case

The two lowest-commitment ways to start are Programme & Delivery Management at £18,000–£35,000 a month, buyable on its own with no requirement that Tenhaw builds anything and cancellable on 30 days' notice either way, or an Agentic Proof of Concept at £20,000–£55,000 fixed over two to four weeks.

Neither commits you to a build. How to put a small supplier to your board sets out the four facts a paper needs, in the form it needs them.

Every row above assumes you should be buying a supplier at all. Build it, buy it, or have someone build it with you is the question that comes first, and if the workflow is not differentiated the answer is none of these rows.

These are not mutually exclusive. Running alongside an incumbent large firm is a common arrangement, with the boundary written down, and the Big Four page answers that question directly.

Costs are as stated on each comparison page. Ours are published in full on the pricing page, alongside the large firms' own published framework rates.

Choosing an AI consultancy

The two questions every buyer starts with, answered with the routing rather than a pitch.

What is the best AI consultancy in the UK?

It depends on what you are buying, and any answer that names one firm without asking is selling something. If you need hundreds of people, multi-domain regulatory depth or a brand your board already accepts, the best buy is a global firm, whose published G-Cloud 14 rates run £2,050 to £3,625 a day at the top grades. If you need senior operators building working software inside your own teams, the best buy is a senior-led boutique, and five tests separate a good one from a brochure: named accountability on every engagement, published prices you can do arithmetic on, evidence labelled as production or proof of concept, a contractual exit with the capability transferred to your permanent team, and a security page that answers your CISO's questions in static prose. Tenhaw publishes all five, including the day rates (£950 to £1,560) every engagement price derives from, and the comparison pages on this site say when a global firm, contractors, an internal taskforce or an offshore partner is the better buy.

How do you choose an AI consultancy in the UK?

Ask four questions before any pitch deck opens. First, who exactly turns up: senior people who do the delivery themselves, under a no-substitution term, or a partner who sells and a pyramid that delivers. Second, what has actually reached production: ask every candidate to label each case study as production, pilot or proof of concept, and watch what happens. Third, how the engagement ends: a contractual exit date, your own engineers upskilled by pair-programming, and everything deployed in your estate so nothing needs migrating when the supplier leaves. Supplier lock-in is designed out at the start or built in by default. Fourth, what the price derives from: published day rates you can multiply (ours are £950 to £1,560, and Big Four rate cards top out at £2,600 to £2,855) rather than a number that appears at the end of a sales process. Then send your security team the candidate's assurance page before the first call: screening, insurance in figures, breach notification in hours, data residency, and the toolchain that checks AI-generated code. A supplier who publishes those answers has decided to be checked. A supplier who sends a deck has decided not to be.

Before you pick a supplier

Build it, buy it, or have someone build it with you

Before you choose between suppliers, work out whether you should be buying a supplier at all. Three routes, what each is best at, and the four questions that settle it.

The short answer

Buy the product when being average at this workflow would cost you nothing. Build it yourself when the workflow is part of how you compete and you already have engineers who can carry evaluation, monitoring and model upgrades as a standing job rather than a project. Have someone build it with you when the workflow is differentiated and that capability is not there yet, which is the common case and the one Tenhaw is priced for. The question that settles it is not technical and it is not about models: it is whether your version of this process is worth being better at than everyone else's. If it is not, buy something off the shelf and spend the money where it changes your position.

Buy an agentic product

A vendor's product, configured against your data and your process.

Wins when
  • The workflow looks like everyone else's, and being average at it costs you nothing
  • You need something running this quarter, on a pilot budget rather than a programme budget
  • You would rather not own evaluation, monitoring and the model upgrade treadmill, and a vendor's engineers will carry all three
  • The vendor sees a hundred customers' edge cases and you see one, so their roadmap is ahead of what you would build
Where it goes wrong
  • Your exceptions are the work. Products are built for the common case, and if the exceptions are why your process is expensive you will be configuring around them indefinitely
  • The workflow is part of how you compete, and buying it makes you identical to whoever else bought it
  • The data the product needs lives in six systems that do not speak to each other, in which case you have an integration programme with a licence fee attached to it
  • Your risk function needs a decision trail the vendor does not expose. Ask for that before signing rather than after
What it costs
Licence, plus the integration that rarely reaches the business case.
Who owns it in year two
The vendor. Their roadmap is now your roadmap.

Build it yourself

Your own engineers, your own repository, your own operating model.

Wins when
  • The workflow is a differentiator and you intend to keep changing it
  • You have engineers who can carry evaluation, monitoring and model deprecation as a standing job
  • The value is in how you use data that is already yours
  • You want the capability permanently, and your timeline can absorb the learning
Where it goes wrong
  • Nobody internal has done it before, so the first months are tuition paid at your own salary cost, which is fine if you planned for it and expensive if you did not
  • The engineers you would use are the ones currently holding the estate up
  • You end up building the parts that are the same for everybody. Orchestration, retrieval and evaluation harnesses are where the year goes
  • The organisation around it does not change, which is how a working system ends up unused
What it costs
Salaries you are already paying, plus the year.
Who owns it in year two
You do. That is the point of it, and it is also the cost of it.

Have someone build it with you

A partner builds inside your estate, paired with your engineers, and leaves on a dated exit.

Wins when
  • The workflow is differentiated and the capability is not there yet
  • You want the capability at the end rather than a dependency, and the test is whether your own engineers can run it without the supplier
  • Roles, decision rights and governance have to move alongside the software
  • You want a fixed price on the first step and a contractual exit date on the rest
Where it goes wrong
  • It is the most expensive of the three per unit of software, and if the workflow was never differentiated you have paid a premium to build something you could have bought
  • Nobody internal is paired onto the build, in which case you have bought a demonstration rather than a capability
  • You have no intention of hiring behind it, so what you are really buying is a dependency with an end date on it
What it costs
£20,000 to £55,000 fixed for a proof of concept, £70,000 to £85,000 a month for a build team of three.
Who owns it in year two
You do, if the handover was real. That is the clause to read before the price.

The four questions that settle it

None of them is about models, and the first one decides most of these arguments on its own.

  1. 01

    Would being average at this workflow cost you anything?

    If the honest answer is no, buy something. This settles most build-versus-buy arguments before anyone opens a vendor comparison, and it is the question asked least often.
  2. 02

    Is the difficulty in the volume or in the exceptions?

    Volume is a product problem and products are good at it. Exceptions are a build problem, because your exceptions are specific to you and nobody else's roadmap will ever reach them.
  3. 03

    Who owns it in year two?

    Every route has an answer to this and only one of them is free. Models get deprecated, prompts drift, upstream formats change, and the evaluation set has to be maintained by somebody. Decide who before you decide what.
  4. 04

    What does your risk function need to see?

    If they have to evidence how a decision was reached, an auditable trail from decision to outcome is a design constraint rather than a feature request. It rules routes in and out before price is discussed.
Our conflict of interest, stated

We sell one of these three, so read the section with that in front of you. Two things make it less self-serving than it looks. We do not resell products, models, platforms or licences and we take no margin on any of them, so no part of your run cost is revenue for us and we have no reason to talk you into a larger one. And Programme and Delivery Management is buyable on its own at £18,000 to £35,000 a month with no requirement that we build anything, including on a programme where the answer turned out to be buy. Our own agentic evidence is proofs of concept rather than a production system, and each case study says so.

Run cost, and who takes a margin on it, is set out in full on the pricing page, and what our agentic work has and has not reached is on the case studies.

Build, buy, or build it with someone

The six questions buyers ask before they get as far as choosing a supplier.

Should we build or buy agentic AI?

Buy when being average at the workflow would cost you nothing. Build when the workflow is part of how you compete and you already have engineers who can carry evaluation, monitoring and model upgrades as a standing job rather than a project. Have someone build it with you when the workflow is differentiated and that capability is not there yet. The deciding question is not technical: it is whether your version of this process is worth being better at than everyone else's. A useful second test is where the difficulty sits. If it is in the volume, that is a product problem and products are good at it. If it is in the exceptions, that is a build problem, because your exceptions are specific to you and no vendor roadmap will reach them.

When is buying an AI product the right choice?

When the process is not differentiated, when you need something running this quarter on a pilot budget, and when you would rather a vendor's engineers carried evaluation, monitoring and the model upgrade treadmill than yours. A vendor who sees a hundred customers' edge cases will often be ahead of anything you would build for a common workflow. Two things stop it. If your exception cases are the reason the process is expensive, you will be configuring around them indefinitely. And if your risk function has to evidence how a decision was reached, ask to see the decision trail the product exposes before you sign rather than after.

When should we build agentic AI in-house?

When the workflow is a differentiator you intend to keep changing, when the value is in data that is already yours, and when you have engineers who can own evaluation, monitoring and model deprecation as a standing job rather than a project. The costs to price in are that the first months are tuition paid at your own salary cost, that the engineers you would use are usually the ones holding the estate up, and that a great deal of the year goes on building the parts that are the same for everybody, meaning orchestration, retrieval and evaluation harnesses. The failure that is not about engineering at all is the organisation staying the same shape, which is how a working system ends up unused.

Can we buy the commodity parts and build the differentiated ones?

Yes, and it is usually the right shape. Models, hosting, search and retrieval, orchestration frameworks and observability are bought by almost everybody building this way, and building your own version of them is where a year disappears. What is worth building is the comparatively thin layer that encodes your exceptions, your policy and your data. If a supplier proposes building the commodity layer for you, ask them why, and ask what you would be able to change in it a year later without them.

What does it mean to have someone build agentic AI with you?

A partner builds inside your estate and your repositories, paired with your engineers rather than in a separate stream, and leaves on a date agreed at kickoff. The measure of whether it worked is not the demonstration, it is whether your own people can run and change the thing without the supplier. On a live engagement, the client engineer who paired on a whole two-week proof-of-concept build finished it saying they were 70% confident they could run the process unaided. That is the number worth asking any supplier for, and it is worth being suspicious of anyone who answers 100%.

Is it cheaper to build or buy an agentic system?

Cheaper to start, almost always buy. Cheaper over three years, it depends entirely on whether you would have kept changing the thing, and no price list answers that. We publish our own build prices: £20,000 to £55,000 fixed for a proof of concept and £70,000 to £85,000 a month for a build team of three. We will not publish a licence figure for products we do not sell. The number both sides of the argument usually leave out is run cost: inference, the platform, storage and search, evaluation and monitoring, and the human review your process still needs. On a build that lands on your own vendor contracts inside your own tenancy, and Tenhaw takes no margin on any of it. On a licence it is inside the subscription until your volumes move. Put it in the business case at the start rather than finding it in year two.

The questions people arrive with

Each answer is the same one given on the comparison page it belongs to.

Should we hire a Big Four consultancy or a boutique for AI transformation?

Choose a global consultancy when you need hundreds of people across multiple countries, deep multi-domain regulatory expertise, or when board expectation requires the brand. Choose a small forward-deployed firm like Tenhaw when you need senior operators building working systems inside your teams, a contractual exit, and pricing you can see before you engage. The determining question is usually whether you need scale or seniority.

Should we hire a Chief AI Officer or use an interim?

Both, in sequence. Hire permanently: that is the right end state and cheaper over any multi-year horizon. Use an interim Embedded Agentic Lead if the board's timeline is shorter than a six-to-nine month search, or if you cannot yet write the job specification accurately. The interim's job includes writing that specification and recruiting against it.

Why do internal AI taskforces stall?

Because scaling an agent pilot requires changing roles, decision rights and governance across functions the taskforce has no authority over. A taskforce is typically staffed part-time by enthusiasts from one or two teams. It can prove agents work; it cannot redefine other people's jobs, and that is what scaling actually requires.

Should we hire AI contractors directly or use a consultancy?

Hire contractors when the architecture and the sequencing are settled, you need specific skills, not a team, and somebody internal has both the authority and the time to direct the work daily. It is cheaper per day, and for that situation it is the better buy. Use a consultancy when the open questions are what to build and how the organisation has to change around it, when nobody internal can absorb the direction load, or when you want one contract with one named person accountable for whether the workflow actually worked rather than whether the tickets closed. The deciding question is not price, it is whether you have the management capacity.

Should we use an offshore or nearshore delivery partner for agentic AI?

Use one where the work can be specified: engineering volume against a written requirement, an overnight or weekend rota, or a bench you need to scale to twenty people and then hold. The cost advantage is real and large, with TCS listing offshore rates between roughly a quarter and just over half of its own onshore rates for the same SFIA level on the G-Cloud 14 framework. Use a small onshore firm like Tenhaw for the part that cannot be specified yet, which in agentic work is usually the first few months: which exceptions matter, what the data actually contains, where a human stays in the loop, and how roles and decision rights change once an agent takes a decision. Plenty of programmes should buy both, with the boundary written down.

What makes an AI transformation consultancy different from an AI build shop?

A build shop delivers working AI software. A transformation consultancy changes how the organisation operates so that software is actually adopted: redefining roles, moving decision rights, rewriting governance and managing the resistance that follows. Most failed agentic programmes have working technology and an unchanged organisation.

Named firms

Comparing us against a firm you can name

Answered from rate cards the firms published themselves on the UK government's G-Cloud 14 framework, with the caveats stated beside the figures.

What are the alternatives to Accenture for AI delivery?

Four, and they are different trades, not better and worse. Another global consultancy, if what you need is scale, multi-domain regulatory depth and a name your board already accepts. A boutique or specialist firm, if you need senior people building inside your teams rather than the top of a pyramid. An offshore or nearshore delivery partner, if the requirement can be written down and cost per head is the binding constraint. Or your own people, through a permanent hire, contractors or an internal taskforce, if you have the management capacity to direct them. On price, do not assume the boutique route is automatically cheaper. Accenture's own published G-Cloud 14 rate card lists strategy and architecture at £2,240 a day at SFIA Level 7, £1,040 at Level 4 and £760 at Level 3. The first is 1.4 times our £1,560 partner rate, not the four times usually assumed, the second sits inside our own band, and the third is below our £950 associate rate. Where a small firm actually costs less is people-days to reach the same answer, not day rate.

Is a boutique cheaper than Deloitte for an AI programme?

At the top grade yes, and by less than the folklore suggests. On the G-Cloud 14 framework Deloitte publishes £2,740 a day at SFIA Level 7 on its specialist card and £2,450 on its standard card, against Tenhaw's published £1,560 partner rate, which is 1.6 to 1.8 times rather than the four times commonly assumed. Deloitte also has no published grade inside our associate-to-senior band: its lowest figure on either card is £1,425 at Level 3, above our £1,250 senior practitioner rate. Not every large firm prices that way. Accenture publishes £1,040 at Level 4 and £760 at Level 3, and TCS £1,070 and £680, all four at or below our senior rate and two of them below our £950 associate rate. If day rate alone is your criterion, some of the large firms win that comparison. Day rate is the wrong unit anyway: the comparable number is team size times duration, which is why our fixed-price Agent-Readiness Audit is £30,000 to £90,000 against the £150,000 to £500,000 a large firm typically prices an equivalent assessment at.

What those figures are, and are not

These are public-sector framework rates, and almost none of our work is public sector. We use them because private-sector consultancy rates are commercially confidential and nobody publishes them, so framework cards are the only competitor pricing that can be verified. They are also competitively tendered against volume commitments, which makes private commercial rates more likely to sit above these figures than below them. If anything, the table understates the gap.

These are SFIA levels, not job titles. The rate cards do not say partner, director or manager, so we quote the levels as the suppliers publish them: Level 7 is defined in the cards as "set strategy, inspire, mobilise", Level 3 as "apply". Nor are the rates directly comparable on their face: EY defines a working day as 7 hours where the others use 8, roughly a 14% difference the headline figure hides. Every figure in this table is quoted from the linked PDF.

These figures are from G-Cloud 14. G-Cloud 15 is awarded in August 2026, and every figure here will be re-verified against the new cards then.

No page on this site targets an individual firm, and nothing here characterises any of them beyond quoting the rate they published themselves. The full table, with each figure linked to the supplier's own PDF, is on the pricing page, and its headline finding goes against us: the Big Four are not four times our price.

Still weighing it up?

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