Pricing and commercials, answered in full.
Published day rates, published engagement prices, and the comparisons that flatter us least. Every competitor figure is quoted from that supplier's own published card.
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7 questions on pricing and commercials, answered by Tenhaw, a UK AI consultancy and AI delivery partner based in London. Nothing here is a summary: each answer is the exact text from the page that owns it, and every group links back to that page for the context around it.
Pricing and rate card
Answered on Pricing and rate card, and rendered here in the same words.
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What do Big Four consultants charge per day in the UK?
On the UK government's G-Cloud 14 framework, the highest published onshore day rates at SFIA Level 7 among the Big Four are KPMG £2,855, Deloitte £2,740 on its specialist card and £2,450 on its standard card, and EY £2,600. We could not locate a PwC rate card on that framework and will not estimate one. For context, two large non-Big-Four suppliers publish rates that bracket them: PA Consulting at £3,625 and Accenture at £2,240, with TCS at £2,050. Mid-grade rates are far lower. Accenture Level 4 is £1,040, TCS £1,070, EY £1,300. These are competitively tendered public-sector framework rates and may differ from private-sector commercial rates. Every figure is quoted from the supplier's own card, linked on our pricing page.
Is Tenhaw cheaper than the Big Four?
At the top grade yes, and by much less than people assume. Our partner rate of £1,560 is 43–76% of published Level 7 rates across the large firms, a multiple of 1.3 to 2.3, not the four times often claimed. At mid grades it reverses: Accenture and TCS publish Level 4 rates inside our associate-to-senior band, and EY publishes above our senior rate. Where the cost difference appears is team size and duration rather than day rate, and that depends entirely on scope.
How much does an AI transformation consultancy cost in the UK?
Tenhaw publishes both. Day rates: partner £1,560, senior practitioner £1,250, associate £950, excluding VAT. Engagements: Agent-Readiness Audit £30,000–£90,000 fixed; Agentic Proof of Concept £20,000–£55,000 fixed over 2–4 weeks; Agentic Design Team £35,000–£55,000 per month; Agentic Build Team £70,000–£85,000 per month; Programme and Delivery Management £18,000–£35,000 per month. Every engagement price derives from the rate card at twenty billable days a month.
Are contractors cheaper than a consultancy for AI work?
Per day, clearly yes. Our estimate is that a senior contract delivery manager, AI engineer or solutions architect is advertised around £530 to £630 a day, and that agency margin takes what you pay to roughly £610 to £870. That is our read of the market rather than a published figure, so check it against your own recruitment data. What it buys is an individual, not a team with an operating model, adoption function and someone accountable for the outcome. For a defined scope where the operating model is not in question, a contractor is the better buy and we will say so.
What does an agentic system cost to run after the build?
That depends on volumes, on the model you choose and on how much of the work still needs a human eye, and we will not put a headline figure on this page for a system we have not run in production. What we can say is where it sits and who profits from it. Model inference, the platform, storage and search, evaluation and monitoring and the human review time are billed to your own accounts inside your own tenancy, on your own vendor contracts. Tenhaw does not resell or mark up models, platforms or licences, so no part of your run cost is revenue for us. Every engagement price we publish is build cost only. The Agent-Readiness Audit produces an estimated run cost per candidate workflow as a named deliverable, derived from prototypes run against your own data.
Why publish your competitors' rates?
So the comparison can be checked rather than taken on trust. The common assumption is that large firms charge roughly four times boutique rates; the published evidence says 1.3 to 2.3 times at the top grade, and at some grades they are cheaper than us. Every competitor figure in the rate table links to the supplier's own PDF, so you can put your comparator's numbers beside ours.
Does a smaller team deliver faster than a large consultancy?
We believe so, and no public dataset compares time-to-outcome across supplier types, so we will not assert it as fact. What we commit to is our own cadence: a monthly production increment we report against, a proof of concept in two to four weeks, and a fixed price agreed before the work starts. Judge that against whatever your incumbent supplier is committing to in writing.
316 questions, grouped by subject
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Most organisations start with a fixed-price Agent-Readiness Audit · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks