The £499 AI readiness audit. Ten days, four deliverables, a number you can act on.
We benchmark your agency against comparable independents, name the margin you are leaving on the table and hand you a roadmap you can start on Monday. If we find nothing worth building, we say so.
Priced before it starts. No day rate, no scope creep.
About two hours of the MD's time in total.
Opportunities, roadmap, policy, client transparency statement. Yours whatever happens next.
What you get
- Five to ten specific opportunities, each rated. Not "use AI for content". The actual recurring tasks in your agency where hours go, with an impact and complexity rating for each, and a projected monthly run-cost so there is a number to approve before anything is built.
- A 90-day roadmap. What to do first, what to leave alone, and what the team needs in place before any tool goes live.
- An internal AI usage policy, fitted to your agency. Approved tools, client data, disclosure, verification, who owns it, written for your tools and your clients rather than copied from a template. If you already have one, we review it instead. What a good one covers.
- A client-facing AI transparency statement. The document you hand a client who asks what is AI-assisted in their work. Increasingly, their procurement team asks before you are appointed.
How the ten days run
Day one: the assessment and a document request
You take the 17-question readiness assessment and send what you have: the AI policy if one exists, the list of tools in use, a sample of the recurring client work (a monitoring summary, a status document, a monthly report) and, where you have it, time data.
Days two to three: one working session
An hour to ninety minutes with the MD and whoever runs operations. The most useful question in it is which task the team hates. The best build in an audit is nearly always volunteered, not found in a spreadsheet.
Days four to eight: the analysis
Where the hours go, which of them sit inside fixed fees and which are billed hourly, and what your stack can connect to. That fee question matters more than any tool: compressing fixed-fee work recovers margin, compressing hourly work gives revenue away.
Day ten: the report, walked through
A written report with your score across five dimensions, where you sit against comparable independents, the rated opportunities and the roadmap, walked through on a call. Sometimes the right answer is enablement and governance with no build at all. When it is, the report says so.
Who it suits
Independent UK PR and marketing agencies with a payrolled team of roughly 15 to 50, led by a founder or MD who can act on the findings. The team has ChatGPT licences and a few heavy users, and nobody owns it.
Agencies that run mostly on freelancers get less from it, because the time and utilisation data the audit works from is not there. Agencies under about 15 staff can still benefit, and we will tell you up front if the retainer that usually follows would be out of proportion to your revenue.
Questions MDs ask before booking
What do you need from us?
About two hours of the MD's time across the ten days: the 17-question assessment, a document request (your AI policy if you have one, the tool list, a sample of the recurring client work) and one working session. Nobody on the team is interviewed unless you want them to be.
What happens to our client data?
Nothing without your sign-off. We work from documents you choose to share, under NDA as standard. Anything we build lives inside your own accounts and your stack, so client material never sits on our systems, and what AI touches is written into the client-facing AI transparency statement you get from the audit.
We already have an AI policy. Is the audit still useful?
Yes, and in that case we review yours instead of writing one. Some agencies' policies are better than any template. The gap is usually the evidence behind the policy: signed acknowledgements, an approved-tools register, a training record and an incident log, which is what a client's procurement team asks for.
Is this the same as the free assessment?
No. The free assessment is a self-reported score from 17 multiple-choice answers, and a score is an opening position, not a measurement. The audit checks the artefacts: the time data, the proposals, the policy, the tools in use. The two regularly disagree, in both directions.
Do we have to go on to a build?
No. The audit is priced to stand on its own and most of its value is the roadmap. If we find nothing worth building, we say so and you keep everything we produced. If there is a build worth doing, it starts from £4,500 and you will know the projected monthly run-cost before you say yes.
Start with the audit. Ten days from now you will know what to build, or that you shouldn't.
Email and say you want the £499 audit. We reply within a working day with the assessment link, the document request and a slot for the working session.
daniel@daio.uk. Prices exclude VAT.