The short answer
AI automation costs a UK firm two separate things, and only one is in the quote. The build is a one-off, commonly quoted at £3,000 to £10,000 for a mid-range project. The run rate is not: Microsoft publishes Power Automate Premium at £11.50 per user a month and an unattended Process licence at £115.30 a month, both excluding VAT, and both continue after the supplier has gone.
Key takeaways
- Self-reported AI use in businesses of ten or more people has risen from around 12% to around 35% since September 2023, while the average adopting business went from 1.4 AI technologies to 1.6.
- Two prices sit behind one quote. The build is negotiated. The run rate is a published list price you can read in a browser before anyone calls you.
- Microsoft publishes Power Automate Premium at £11.50 per user a month, Power Automate Process at £115.30 per bot a month, its hosted equivalent at £165.30, and Microsoft 365 Copilot at £13.80 per user a month. All exclude VAT.
- Article 35 puts the assessment duty on the controller before processing begins. The controller is your firm, and no supplier invoice discharges it.
- Day rate against fixed price decides who absorbs the cost of a wrong estimate. It does not decide which one is cheaper.
Between September 2023 and June 2026 the proportion of UK businesses with ten or more employees reporting they use at least one AI technology rose to just under three times its starting level, from around 12% to around 35%. Over the same period the average number of AI technologies used per adopting business rose from around 1.4 to 1.6.
Those two figures pull against each other. Nearly three times as many firms are buying, and the ones that bought run almost exactly what they ran before. Adoption is wide and shallow, and the same statistics note that professional services firms most often reach AI by purchasing external software rather than by having anything built.
That changes what the price question is. A build quote is a one-off number, and it is the number every published cost guide argues about. It is not the number a managing partner ends up living with.
Every published price for this is a build price
No published cost guide for automation prices the thing the firm actually carries, which is the licence sitting underneath the automation. Search the question and the results are written, without exception, by firms that sell the work. AI Workforce, an automation supplier, publishes a mid-range build at £3,000 to £10,000 and custom AI from £10,000, with monthly support at £200 to £800. That last line is support. It is not the software.
Nobody is being dishonest. The page prices the part the supplier sells and stops there, which is the same reading error behind treating a column of asking prices as a market rate. It costs more here, because the omitted half recurs.
Day rate and fixed price decide who pays for a wrong estimate
Neither pricing model is cheaper than the other. The difference is who absorbs the cost when the process turns out not to work the way it was described. Automation work is unusually exposed to this, because the process being automated is almost never documented before somebody tries.
| What you are deciding | Day rate | Fixed price |
|---|---|---|
| Who carries the estimating risk | Your firm. Every hour spent finding out how the process works is billed to you | The supplier, who has priced that risk into the number before you saw it |
| What happens when the process is not what you described | The work continues and the invoice grows, usually without a conversation | A change request, which is a negotiation you can prepare for |
| What you can verify afterwards | Days worked, and by which named person | The deliverable, and nothing behind it |
| What it suits | A process nobody has written down yet, where discovery is the real work | A documented, stable process with a defined finish line |
The cost that does not stop when the project does
A 20-person firm running one automation carries roughly £3,900 a year in published licence fees before a single hour of build has been paid for. None of those rates came from an agency. They are Microsoft's own published UK list prices for Power Automate and for Microsoft 365 Copilot, readable in a browser before a first call.
| Standing line | Published rate | 20-person firm | 40-person firm |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power Automate Premium, for staff who run the flow | £11.50 per user a month | 6 users, £828 | 12 users, £1,656 |
| Power Automate Process, one unattended bot | £115.30 per bot a month | £1,384 | £1,384 |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot, for fee earners | £13.80 per user a month | 10 users, £1,656 | 24 users, £3,974 |
| Standing cost a year, before the build | Paid yearly, excluding VAT | £3,868 | £7,014 |
Before you sign an automation quote
Find out what the whole thing costs, not just the build.
Send us the scope and the number. Free to your firm. The agency pays us, and only if the relationship works.
Get a recommendationThe assessment nobody quotes for
Article 35 of the UK GDPR puts the assessment duty on the controller, before processing begins, and the controller is your firm. The wording is unambiguous: where processing using new technologies is likely to result in a high risk, the controller shall, prior to the processing, carry out an assessment of the impact.
The Information Commissioner's Office also sets out nine indicators of likely high risk, among them evaluation or scoring, and innovative use of new technological solutions. It says that in most cases a combination of two of those indicators means an assessment is needed. An automation that sorts or scores client records using a tool the firm has not run before has met two of them before anyone has written a line of it.
That is partner or data protection officer time, and it is not on the supplier's invoice. It cannot be, because the duty does not transfer. Your supplier is a processor, and the Commissioner's guidance on controller and processor arrangements sets out what the written contract between you has to contain. Budget those hours.
When a firm should not buy an automation build yet
Two conditions make this premature, and the second one catches professional services firms in particular.
- Nobody has written the process down. An automation is a set of rules, and where the rules live in one person's head the first invoice buys discovery the practice could have done itself for nothing
- The requirement is a licence rather than a build. If the whole ambition is that fee earners draft faster, that is £13.80 per user a month and an afternoon of training. A build quote for it is a build quote for a subscription
There is also a size below which the arithmetic never closes. An automation saving one member of staff two hours a week saves roughly £2,200 a year against a £42,000 salary. Set that against £3,868 of standing licence cost and the automation loses money every year it runs. Nobody cancels a licence attached to a project the firm paid to build.
We match firms with agencies and are paid by the agency, so a page telling a firm to buy a subscription instead of a build costs us. What we assess before recommending anyone, including where we decline to introduce anybody at all, is on our page for professional services firms.
Frequently asked questions
What managing partners ask us about automation pricing.
What does an AI automation build cost a firm of 10 to 50 people?
Published quotes for a first project run from a few hundred pounds for a single workflow to £10,000 and above for something custom. Every one of those figures is an asking price set by a firm that sells the work, and the build is only half of what you pay. The licence underneath it renews whether the automation earns its keep or not.
Is a day rate or a fixed price better for automation work?
Neither is cheaper. A fixed price moves the estimating risk to the supplier, who prices that risk into the number, so you pay for their uncertainty whether or not it materialises. A day rate keeps the risk with you and is only worth taking when somebody inside the firm has already written the process down.
What continues to cost money after the automation is built?
Per-user and per-bot software licences, which are published list prices. Microsoft charges £11.50 per user a month for Power Automate Premium and £115.30 a month for a single unattended Process licence, both excluding VAT. Add the supplier's support retainer and the internal time to review what the automation produced.
Do we need a data protection impact assessment for an automation?
Often, yes. Article 35 of the UK GDPR requires the controller, meaning your firm rather than your supplier, to assess the impact before processing begins. The Information Commissioner's Office lists nine indicators of likely high risk and says a combination of two usually means an assessment is needed. An automation that scores client records using a new tool has met two.
How do we tell whether a quote includes anyone who has built this before?
Ask which named person writes the automation and how many days they hold. A quote that will not resolve into named people and days cannot be compared with a second quote, and the headcount behind the supplier is filed at Companies House if you would rather check than ask.
Sources and useful reading
- Office for National Statistics, Artificial intelligence in UK businesses: 2023 to 2026, released 20 July 2026. Adoption rates and technologies used per business.
- Microsoft, Power Automate pricing, published sterling rates per user and per bot, excluding VAT.
- Microsoft, Microsoft 365 Copilot for business, published per-user sterling rates on annual and monthly commitment.
- Information Commissioner's Office, when do we need to do a DPIA, Article 35 and the nine high-risk indicators.
- AI Workforce, AI automation pricing, cited as a published asking price by a seller, not as market evidence.
This article is commercial decision support, not legal, regulatory, tax or investment advice. The run rate is illustrative and uses round seat counts so that you can substitute your own. List prices were recorded on 1 September 2026 and software prices change without notice.