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.

On the day rate itself, nothing. Contractors are cheaper per day. Our read of the market has a senior contract delivery manager, AI engineer or solutions architect advertised around £530 to £630 a day, and agency margin taking what you actually pay to roughly £610 to £870, against our published £950 to £1,560. That is our read as at July 2026, not a citable figure, since nobody publishes private-sector contract rates in a reusable form, so check it against your own recruitment data. The lower rate leaves out the operating model, the adoption work, governance design, and 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 goes first, because 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 is next. Briefing, unblocking and reviewing is close to a full-time job, and it lands on someone who already has one. Last comes the organisation, where 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.

Often, yes. A contractor who stays a year becomes real institutional knowledge at a fraction of consultancy cost, and where the architecture and the sequencing are already settled, that is the better buy. What tenure does not settle is design, governance or adoption. No individual contractor has a mandate to change anyone's role, and one person building is not the same as one person whose job is the whole system. Tenhaw engagements are short and directed instead, with an exit date agreed at kickoff, 30 days' notice either side, and recruiting your permanent team written into the longer ones. Price the year against what you need decided, not only against what you need built.

Unless writing it down was made part of the job, it leaves with the person, and it rarely is. The contract ends, notice is short, and the next contractor starts by reading code with no commentary attached. It is fixable, if documentation and handover sit in the contractor brief from day one. Tenhaw builds it into the work instead. Engineering is paired with your engineers as it happens, design decisions are written down as they are made, and recruiting your permanent team is a stated deliverable on the longer engagements. On a live engagement the client engineer who paired on a two-week proof of concept finished it saying they were 70% confident they could run the process without us.

Rarely. A contractor sells time under a contract for services, each person accountable for their own tasks, so there is usually nobody on the other side able to own the scope and the risk a fixed price requires. That is not a flaw, it is the shape of the product, and for open-ended capacity a time-based rate is the more honest instrument. Cost certainty on a defined piece of work is one of the clearer arguments for buying a service instead. Tenhaw's AI Readiness Audit is £44,000 fixed for four weeks, and the Agentic Proof of Concept is £20k–£55k fixed for 2–4 weeks, both priced before the work starts.

You do. Hiring directly means contractor onboarding and security screening are your processes to run, and where they already work without a project to fix them, that is a genuine point in favour of contractors. Where they do not, the fixing lands on the same people who are supposed to be directing the work, and that cost rarely shows up in the day-rate comparison. Buying a service moves it inside the price. Everyone Tenhaw puts in front of a client is screened to BS7858 standard before any client access, and onboarding them is our job rather than yours. Neither answer is wrong, but they are different amounts of work for your team, so count that work when you compare rates.

Nothing automatic, on either option, so the real question is who calls it. Contractors sell time under a contract for services, so the days are billed as worked and judging whether the month moved anything is your job, which is fine where somebody has the time to do it. Our engagements are retainer-shaped rather than milestone-shaped, the measurable value a month has to produce is agreed at the start of it, and a month that delivers no measurable value is reported as a failed month. You own everything built during it, and notice is 30 days either side, so acting on a bad month is cheap.

Price the direction rather than assuming it is free. Briefing, sequencing, setting the quality bar, reviewing, unblocking and re-briefing five people is close to a full-time senior job, so the honest line in the business case is a large fraction of somebody's salary, usually the sponsor's, plus the value of whatever they stop doing to make room for it. If you would rather have a market price for that job than an estimate, ours is published at £18,000 to £35,000 a month for Programme and Delivery Management, which is buyable on its own, including on a build we are not doing. Set that against the day-rate saving before concluding the contractors were cheaper.

It starts at the other end. Kickoff sets the exit date before anything is built, which is the opposite of how a contractor engagement begins, and the squad is two or three senior people screened to BS7858 standard before any client access, with onboarding our job rather than a set of tasks on your team's list. The early weeks settle the architecture and the sequence, and pair with your engineers on the first slice rather than running a separate stream. By the end of the month you should have one architecture somebody owns, a sequence for the next quarter and a first slice running, rather than several reasonable opinions.

Contractors, and it is one of their genuine advantages. Each person sits on their own contract with its own notice, so you can end one engagement without touching the others and taper capacity a person at a time as funding moves. Ours is a single contract with 30 days' notice either side and a squad of two or three, so scaling back is one decision rather than a dial. What ours gives you instead is a planned ending, with the exit date and the taper agreed at kickoff rather than negotiated at the end. If quarter-to-quarter flexibility is your binding constraint, hire contractors and keep the option.

Ask the things that decide whether the group works, not only whether the person can build. Ask each candidate how they would approach retrieval, evaluation and orchestration, then put the answers side by side. Three good contractors will give you three reasonable designs, and somebody has to own which one wins. Ask how they record a design decision at the moment they make it, and put documentation and handover in the brief rather than hoping for them at the end. Ask how much direction they expect and who they go to when blocked, because that person is usually your sponsor. And accept that no contractor arrives with a mandate to change anyone's role.

Yes, and for some organisations that is the sensible shape. The AI Readiness Audit is £44,000 fixed for four weeks, standalone with no obligation to continue, and it ends in working prototypes rather than slides, so what you hold at the end is the architecture and a sequenced build plan your own people or a contractor team could execute. Contractors become the better buy in precisely that state, because the decisions are made, what is missing is hands, and you keep the day-rate difference. Two jobs still need an owner before you go that way. Somebody has to direct the work daily, and somebody needs a mandate to change how people work once the software lands.

Mostly you. A contract for services makes each person accountable for their own tasks, which is the right shape for that instrument, so if the workflow does not work there is no single party who owed you the workflow, and whatever recourse exists is split across contracts you negotiated separately. Buying a service moves that to one contract and one named partner accountable for the outcome, with the awkward conversation going to the person who sold you the engagement. Our insurance levels are published on the security page, and cover can be increased for a specific engagement where your supplier standard requires it, priced in.

Yes, and for running and extending it that is usually the cheaper answer. We do not sell a managed service, so once the first version is live something has to keep it moving, and with the architecture settled that is exactly the work contract engineers do well, at our estimated £610 to £870 a day. What makes the handover survivable is what happened during the build: everything is deployed in your own repositories and infrastructure, design decisions are written down as they are made, your engineers paired on the code rather than receiving it, and on payment you own all deliverables, documentation and code.

No, though a forward deployed engineer and a good contract engineer look alike day to day, both building inside your repositories, under your controls. A contract engineer is accountable for their own tasks under a contract for services, so the architecture, the sequencing and the coherence across several of them stay your job. Ours arrives attached to an outcome instead, inside a squad of two or three where the design and the adoption are already owned and one named partner is accountable for whether the workflow worked. They bill at our published senior practitioner rate of £1,250 a day. If those decisions are settled and you have time to direct the work, hire the contract engineer.