What Does an AI Assessment Give an SME, and What Does It Cost?

An AI opportunity assessment gives you a written plan: a prioritized list of which processes can be automated, at what cost, and how fast each pays back. It starts from HUF 500,000 + VAT; the final price depends on the number of processes and systems reviewed. In a 10-50 person company, 2-3 processes typically consume most of the manual working time; the assessment identifies them and ranks them by return. This article describes what the assessment contains, how it runs, what it costs, and when it is not the right first step.

What does the AI assessment contain?

• Process list and ranking. The processes that carry the manual work, ordered by payback: how many hours they take per month, what share of them can be automated, and what remains a human decision.
• Cost and payback estimates. For every proposed automation: expected development cost, running cost and payback time. Our published ranges set the frame: an AI assistant or integration project is usually €15-40K, a document processing system €30-80K; the assessment narrows these to your numbers.
• Data and system map. Where the documents and data live, in which formats, which systems have to be connected, and what is missing. This decides how much preparation the development needs.
• EU AI Act risk classification. The planned systems classified with a written rationale; from this follows what has to be built in for documentation, human oversight and logging.
• A written plan. All of the above in one document you can work with even if you do not continue with us: you can ask another vendor to quote on it.

How does the assessment run?

It starts with a kickoff conversation: you tell us where most of the time goes and which systems your team works in. Then we walk through the steps with the colleagues who know the process, on samples: invoices, emails, quotes, documents. The technical review covers access to the systems and the data. At the end we discuss the written plan together and mark where to start.

The time needed depends on the number of processes reviewed; we agree it at the kickoff and put it in writing. No in-house IT team is required.

What does it cost, and what moves the price?

The assessment starts from HUF 500,000 + VAT. The final amount is set by the number of processes and systems involved: one process in one ERP is a different scope from five processes across four systems. We quote the price in writing after the kickoff conversation.

Several providers do not bill for the assessment; our market overview shows which ones. In that setup the result is often shaped around the provider's own development offer. A paid assessment produces a vendor-neutral written plan that you can put out to other vendors as well. For AI project pricing in general, see How much does AI adoption cost in 2026?.

When is the assessment not the right first step?

If a single, well-defined process is in question and the decision has been made, the next step is a pilot: in 2-3 weeks you see whether it works on your own data. If the data is still on paper, or there is no system the process would start from, sort that out first. If the question is whether the company has a paying AI idea at all, the AI use case evaluator and the AI ROI calculator give a first picture within a minute.

What happens after the assessment?

Based on the plan, you get an exact quote with no hidden costs. A pilot starts on the recommended first process: a small proof of concept is ready in 2-3 weeks and gives a measurable baseline. Most projects go from kickoff to production in 6-12 weeks. Source code, trained models and data pipelines remain yours. If the assessment finds no AI project that pays back, we write that down too: often a script, RPA or a database query is the right answer. The details of our entry offering for SMEs are on the AI consulting for SMEs page.