How much does an enterprise agentic AI build cost?

A scoped production deployment typically runs between 180,000 and 420,000 US dollars depending on how many systems it integrates, how strict the deployment topology is, and how much of the knowledge base has to be built from unstructured sources. Architecture and security review is a separate fixed-price first phase.

Are there ongoing licence fees?

No licence. You receive the source and run the system on your own infrastructure, so the only recurring costs are your own inference, hosting, and maintenance. Optional support retainers exist but nothing stops working if you decline one.

What drives the price up or down?

Upward: air-gapped deployment, more than three integrated systems, a knowledge base that must be built from unstructured documents, and regulated-industry evidence requirements. Downward: an existing semantic layer or data platform, a single well-documented system of record, and an internal team available to take handover.

Fixed scope. Published ranges.

Q: Do you charge time and materials?

No. Engagements are fixed-scope and fixed-price against a defined outcome. Time and materials pays a supplier more the longer the work takes, which is the wrong incentive when the supplier controls the schedule.

Most firms in this category will not publish a number, which wastes a month of everyone's time before either side learns whether the budget is in the same order of magnitude. Here are the ranges, what moves them, and what you own when it ends.

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How engagements are structured

Two phases, priced separately.

The first is small and deliberately decoupled, so you can stop after it with something useful in hand and no obligation to continue.

PHASE 01

Architecture & Security Review

$18,000 – $32,000

2–3 weeks · fixed price

We sit with your security architects, platform team, and the people who own the systems in scope, and settle the decisions that cannot be reversed later: deployment topology, data residency, identity provider, egress policy, and audit requirements.

→ Threat model and deployment diagram your reviewers have already seen
→ Integration assessment against the systems actually in scope
→ Fixed-price proposal for phase two, or an honest answer that we are wrong for this

Yours to keep. The deliverables are useful even if you build it yourself or hire someone else. There is no clause requiring you to proceed.

PHASE 02

Build, Harden & Transfer

$180,000 – $420,000

6–12 weeks · fixed price, set in phase one

A production system built against your real data inside your environment, red-teamed, instrumented, and handed over with everything needed to own it. The range reflects genuine variation in scope, not negotiating room.

→ Full source with history, plus infrastructure-as-code
→ Architecture decision records covering what was rejected and why
→ Automated test suite running in your CI
→ Hands-on enablement for the engineers who will carry it

No licence, no per-seat fee. You run it on your own infrastructure. If we disappeared the following Monday it would keep running and your team could extend it.

Scope drivers

What moves you across the range.

Published so you can estimate your own position before talking to us.

Pushes toward the top

↑ Air-gapped deployment. Every dependency has to be resolved without outbound access, including inference and retrieval.
↑ More than three integrated systems. Each connector adds an auth model, a schema, and a failure mode.
↑ A knowledge base built from unstructured sources. Parsing a decade of inconsistent documents is the single largest variable in this work.
↑ Regulated-industry evidence requirements. Qualification artifacts and validation records are real engineering, not paperwork.

Pulls toward the bottom

↓ An existing semantic layer or governed data platform. The hardest modelling work is already done.
↓ One well-documented system of record. A single clean integration beats four ambiguous ones.
↓ Standard cloud deployment. BYOC in a mainstream cloud is well-trodden; air-gapped is not.
↓ An internal team ready to take handover. Transfer is faster and cheaper when there is somebody to transfer to.

Commercial model

Why not time and materials.

Time and materials pays a supplier more the longer the work takes, while the supplier controls the schedule. That incentive is fine when the client sets scope daily and wrong when they do not.

The estimate risk sits with us

If the build takes longer than we judged, that is our problem. Phase one exists precisely so that judgment is informed rather than a guess — which is why we will not quote phase two before doing it.

Change is handled by change order

Scope genuinely does change. When it does, it is priced explicitly rather than absorbed silently into a burn rate nobody is tracking until the quarter closes.

Support is optional, not structural

A retainer is available and roughly 10–15% of build cost annually. Nothing stops working without it — that is the difference between support and a licence.

Model it against your own numbers first.

The ROI calculator uses the same build-investment figures shown above, so the payback period it produces is the one you would actually be underwriting.

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