Hiring contractors instead, answered in full.

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.

Per day, clearly. Our read of the market is that a senior contract delivery manager, AI engineer or solutions architect is advertised somewhere around £530 to £630 a day, and that agency margin takes what you actually pay to roughly £610 to £870, against our published £950 to £1,560. That is our read as at July 2026 rather than a citable published figure, because private-sector contract rates are not published by anyone in a form we can reuse, so check it against your own recruitment data. What the lower rate does not include is the operating model, the adoption work, governance design, or anybody accountable for whether the thing worked. For a defined scope where the operating model is not in question, the contractor is the better buy and we will say so on the call.

It is the wrong unit, and the arithmetic shows why. Three contractors at our estimated £610 to £870 a day is roughly £37,000 to £52,000 a month at twenty billable days, against our Agentic Build Team of three at £70,000 to £85,000. On headcount alone the contractors win comfortably. What the sum leaves out is the fourth person, the one who decides what the three build, in what order, to what standard, and who owns it when it does not work. If you have that person and they have the time, buy the three contractors. If that person is your sponsor and they already have a job, you have not saved the difference, you have moved it onto a calendar.

Three things, and none of them is engineering skill. Coherence: five capable people produce five reasonable designs for retrieval, evaluation and orchestration, and with nobody whose job is the whole, the design converges on whoever argues hardest. Direction: briefing, unblocking and reviewing is close to a full-time job and it lands on someone who already has one. And the organisation: a contractor has no mandate to change roles, incentives or decision rights, which is the same wall an internal taskforce hits, so a working system can land into an unchanged organisation and go unused.

Yes, and it is one of the more common shapes. Programme and Delivery Management is buyable on its own at £18,000 to £35,000 a month with no requirement that we build anything, so we will direct and govern a build your own contractors are doing. Where we are building, your contractors sit in the same squad and pair on the work rather than being handed a separate stream. What we will not do is put our name to an outcome delivered by people we neither selected nor can release, and we will tell you which of those two shapes we are in before you sign.

It can, and it is a question for your own tax and legal advisers rather than for us. What we can tell you is what we sell: a service with a defined scope, a fixed price on the way in for the audit and the proof of concept, people under our own contracts screened to BS7858 standard before any client access, our own supervision, and our own equipment where you do not provide it. Take that description to whoever owns your status determinations.