What a real pilot actually costs. Discovery, prompts, integrations, evals, change management, training. With three line-item breakdowns by deal size.
Vendors price the LLM and the platform fee. They do not price discovery, integrations, evals, change management, training, or the inevitable second iteration after the first prompt does not work. Below: three real budgets for three different deal sizes, with everything in. The 72-hour deploy plan We ship most projects in this category on a 72-hour clock. Interview the two people who do this job today.
Interview the two people who do this job today. Pull 50 sample inputs (calls, chats, tickets). Identify the three top customer intents. Stand up the eval harness with 25 cases drawn from the sample inputs. The eval harness has to exist before the first prompt does.
What a real pilot actually costs. Discovery, prompts, integrations, evals, change management, training. With three line-item breakdowns by deal size. It is filed under AI Strategy because that is where operators looking for this problem actually start, and it is written from production work rather than from a content calendar.