AI consultancy

What we mean by AI consultancy

Every vendor has a Copilot. Every platform has an agent. Most UK businesses have neither the time nor the appetite to evaluate them one by one, let alone keep them safe and useful. That's what an AI consultancy is actually for - taking the pile of options, matching it to what your business needs this quarter, and getting it live without breaking anything.

At Axon we approach AI as a governed capability, not a stack of disconnected tools. We call it managed intelligence, and it's how we help UK businesses move past the pilot stage into results people can measure.

Who we work with

Our sweet spot is UK-based SMBs and mid-market organisations - typically 50 to 1,000 people - who already run on Microsoft 365 and want to make more of it. We work across professional services, financial services, manufacturing, energy, education and the third sector. If you've bought Copilot licences and aren't sure they're paying back, or you're weighing up whether to buy them at all, you're in the right place.

Where we help

Six practical areas that map to what modern AI adoption actually looks like:

How an engagement usually runs

We don't do open-ended "AI strategy" projects that end with a slide deck. Every engagement is scoped in stages so you can stop, redirect, or keep going with your eyes open.

• Discovery. A short call, then a structured review of where you are - licensing, data, security posture, the two or three processes that hurt most.
• Readiness. Fix the boring but critical things first. Permissions, oversharing, data hygiene, Copilot sizing. This is often where the money is.
• Pilot. A focused rollout to one team or one process, with clear success criteria agreed upfront.
• Scale. Roll out to the wider business with an adoption plan, measurement and a governance model that doesn't need us to be present.
• Ongoing care. Optional monthly support so someone reads the Microsoft release notes and keeps your AI safe and current.

What an AI consultant does

An AI consultant is the person who turns "we should probably be doing something with AI" into a small set of specific, measurable projects with a plan attached. The job isn't to predict the future or write a strategy deck - it's to look at your business, your tools, your data and your team, and tell you honestly where AI would move the needle and where it wouldn't.

Day to day, that looks like:

• Running workshops to find the two or three processes where AI would actually pay back.
• Reviewing your Microsoft 365 estate, licences and data before recommending anything.
• Sizing pilots, agreeing what "success" looks like and picking the right platform for each use case.
• Building and shipping the first working version alongside your team, not in isolation.
• Setting up the governance, training and measurement so the wins survive after we leave.

A good AI consultant is also comfortable saying "don't do this yet". Half the value we deliver is stopping clients spending money on tools that won't earn their keep.

AI consulting services we deliver

The catalogue of services most clients pick from:

• AI strategy and use case discovery. A structured workshop to identify where AI belongs in your business over the next 6 to 12 months.
• Copilot readiness assessment. Licensing, security, oversharing and data hygiene checks before you turn Copilot on. See the readiness assessment guide.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout. Sizing, deployment, adoption and measurement across your business. See our Microsoft 365 Copilot service.
• Copilot Studio agent builds. Purpose-built agents for onboarding, IT triage, sales research and more. See Copilot Studio.
• Data and reporting. Microsoft Fabric and Power BI so people, and AI, work from one trusted view of your data.
• Power Platform automation. Power Automate and Power Apps for the process automation that often delivers bigger ROI than chat AI.
• Generative AI on your content. Retrieval-augmented agents grounded on your policies, contracts and knowledge base. See our generative AI consultancy page.
• AI governance and adoption. Policies, guardrails, training, champions and reporting so leadership can prove AI is safe and paying back.
• Ongoing AI care. Monthly support so someone reads the Microsoft release notes and keeps your AI current and safe.

AI consultancy costs

"How much does it cost?" is the first question we get on almost every enquiry, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on scope. A two-week readiness review for one team looks nothing like a six-month rollout across a whole business - so we don't pretend a headline price tag would be meaningful. What we can promise is a clear shape:

• AI readiness assessment. Two to three weeks. Licensing, security, data and use case review with a written recommendation.
• Copilot pilot. Six to ten weeks. Focused rollout to one team with adoption support and measurement.
• Copilot Studio agent build. Sized around the process complexity, integrations and evaluation work needed.
• Wider AI rollout. Three to six months. Multiple teams, governance, adoption programme and measurement.
• Ongoing AI care. Monthly, scaled to the size of the estate and the queue of enhancements and new agents you want us to work through.

Platform licences (Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Azure OpenAI, Fabric) sit on top and are consumption or per-user based. Right-sizing them is one of the highest-value things a good consultancy does for you, and it's usually the first place we look.

We scope every engagement in fixed stages against your actual scope so you're never signing a blank cheque, and we'd rather turn down a project than sell you something that won't pay back. Request a tailored quote and we'll come back within one working day with a real number for the work you actually have in mind.

How we estimate cost

We don't work from a rate card or a "starter package" price. Every estimate we produce is built up from three things: the scope of work, the timeline it needs to run over, and the deliverables you'll actually walk away with. That's it - no headline number pulled out of the air, no discount off a made-up list price.

Scope. We map the work against a specific slice of your business rather than a vague ambition. That means naming the teams involved, the systems in play, the processes we're touching, the data sources that need cleaning up, the integrations required and the governance work that has to sit around it. A pilot for one team with one Copilot use case is a very different shape to a rollout across five departments with agents, Fabric reporting and a Purview programme underneath.

Timeline. We estimate the calendar time the work realistically needs, not the theoretical effort. That includes discovery, build, testing, adoption, training and the handover to your team. Compressed timelines cost more because they need more people in parallel; longer timelines cost more because they carry more coordination. We'll tell you which end of that spectrum your project sits on and why.

Deliverables. Every stage produces something concrete you can point at - a written readiness report, a working pilot with named users, a governance policy signed off by your leadership, an agent live in production, a Power BI model your finance team actually uses. We estimate against those artefacts, not against hours, so you know exactly what you're paying for and what "done" looks like.

On top of that we factor in the things that quietly move estimates around: the state of your data and permissions, how many stakeholders need to be in the room, whether we're integrating with legacy systems, and how much change management your teams need. We'll flag each of these openly in the proposal so there are no surprises later.

The output is a fixed-scope, fixed-stage proposal. You see what each stage delivers, how long it takes and what it costs, with the option to stop or continue after each one. If the scope changes mid-engagement, we re-estimate in the open - never a "change request" ambush at the end.

What good looks like: three short stories

Anonymised sketches of engagements we've run - names and industries generalised, numbers rounded.

• A 180-person professional services firm. Bought 60 Copilot licences on a whim, six months later nobody was using them. We ran a two-week readiness and adoption programme - cleaned up oversharing, ran a champions group, built a 12-prompt library for their two most common workflows. Active usage went from 12% to 71% inside a quarter, and they cancelled 15 unused licences.
• A UK manufacturer with 400 staff. Wanted to "do something with AI" for customer support. We built a Copilot Studio agent that reads their product manuals and answers Tier-1 support questions, deflecting ~35% of inbound tickets. Payback in under five months, and the support team spends more time on the complex jobs they'd rather do anyway.
• A financial services SMB with 60 staff. Concerned Copilot would surface confidential client information to the wrong people. We ran a Purview labelling and permissions programme first, then piloted Copilot with the operations team. Zero oversharing incidents in the first six months, and the compliance team signed off on wider rollout with confidence.

Why UK businesses choose Axon

• We're specialists, not generalists. Deep in Microsoft 365, Copilot, Fabric, Power Platform and agents. That focus means faster answers and fewer surprises.
• We speak plain English. No 60-slide "AI transformation" decks. You'll get one page that says what to do next, what it'll cost and what it'll change.
• We care about governance. Every rollout ships with permissions cleaned up, oversharing risk understood and licences right-sized. You get the productivity stories without the security stories.
• We stay UK-based. Real people, UK working hours, on video or on site when it matters.

Where to start

Most first engagements start in one of three places, depending on where you are today:

• A Copilot readiness assessment if you're about to buy licences or wondering why the ones you have aren't landing.
• A data readiness review if you suspect your SharePoint and Teams estate isn't ready for an AI that can read everything.
• A Power Platform discovery if the fastest wins are automating admin, not asking a chatbot for help.

Straight answers to the questions we get most

How much does an AI consultancy in the UK cost? It depends entirely on scope. A focused readiness assessment for one team is a short, low-commitment piece of work. A full Copilot rollout with data readiness, adoption and governance is a multi-month programme. We scope every engagement in fixed stages against your actual scope, so you get a real number tied to real work rather than a headline range that doesn't apply to you.

Do you only work with Microsoft AI? Microsoft is where most of our clients live, so that's the fastest way to value. We integrate other tools where they earn their place.

We're a small business. Is this worth it for us? Often yes, and often more than for larger firms. Smaller teams feel repetitive admin most acutely, and the tools you already pay for in Microsoft 365 already include a lot of the capability. A short readiness review will tell you honestly if it's worth going further.

What does an AI consultant actually do? Turns "we should probably do something with AI" into a small set of specific, measurable projects with a plan attached - covering use cases, licensing, data readiness, pilot design, rollout, adoption and governance.

How long does an engagement take? A readiness assessment is typically two to three weeks. A focused pilot runs six to ten weeks. A wider rollout is three to six months. We work in fixed stages so you can stop or continue at any point.

Will you help us build a business case? Yes. Every engagement produces a short business case with expected time savings, risks, licence costs and success measures. If the numbers don't stack up, we'll say so.

How do you keep our data safe? We clean up permissions and oversharing before AI is turned loose on your content, apply Microsoft Purview labelling where it fits, and configure Copilot and Azure AI so your data stays inside your tenant. We'll walk you through exactly what does and doesn't leave.