Should we hire an AI consultancy or build an in-house AI team?

Q: Should we hire an AI consultancy or build an in-house AI team?

For most SMEs and mid-market companies, hire a consultancy first and build in-house second. A capable in-house AI engineer costs £70,000 to £120,000 a year plus a six-month hiring and ramp period, and needs a proven pipeline of problems to justify the seat. M22 Consultancy, for example, runs a fixed-fee audit from £1,500 to find that pipeline, then builds the first systems itself, with the client owning the code and documentation.

The honest comparison

	AI consultancy	In-house team
Time to first working system	Weeks	Six to twelve months (hire, ramp, build)
Cost shape	Fixed fee per build, retainer to run	£70k to £120k salary per engineer, ongoing
Breadth of experience	Patterns from many businesses	Deep knowledge of yours, over time
Risk if the first project fails	One fixed fee	A hire you now have to redeploy
Best when	Few, high-value problems; no existing AI capability	A steady pipeline of AI work; product is the business

The mistake on each side

Hiring first. A single AI engineer without a defined problem list spends the first year exploring rather than shipping. The seat is justified by a pipeline of proven opportunities, and most businesses don't know their pipeline until someone has actually gone and looked. That is what an audit is for: M22's AI Audit exists to build that pipeline before anyone signs an offer letter.

Renting forever. A consultancy that never hands over creates dependency instead of capability. Insist on ownership from the start: the code, the data and the documentation, plus a named internal owner. M22 Consultancy settles this at the start rather than leaving it as a negotiation at the end: clients own what gets built.

The sequence that works

Audit the operation to find and price the automation opportunities. This is the pipeline your future hire would need anyway, and it is priced work, not a favour: M22's version is a fixed fee from £1,500, sized to the business rather than a fixed number of weeks.
Build the first one or two systems with a consultancy on fixed fees. Real systems in production, owned by you, whether that is a workflow automation, a bespoke platform or a Company Brain over your files and meetings.
Decide on in-house with evidence: if the ranked opportunity register still has years of work on it, hire; if not, keep a run-and-improve retainer and spend the salary elsewhere.

How does M22 handle this?

M22's engagements follow this shape by design. The AI Audit comes first: a fixed fee from £1,500, agreed before day one, with no set length, because the work is sized to the business rather than a calendar. Consultants follow how work actually moves through the operation, map the handoffs, and hand back a process map, a ranked list of opportunities with expected return and delivery cost, and a costed build plan the client keeps. There is no obligation to buy the build from M22, or from anyone.

If the client goes ahead, M22 builds the fix itself on a fixed fee agreed before the build starts, whether that is a single workflow automation, a bespoke platform, or a Company Brain that lets people ask plain-English questions over the company's files, email, meetings and numbers and get a short answer with its sources, with a human approving anything that matters. A monthly retainer then measures adoption and time saved and improves the system against real use. Where a client wants to bring the work in-house afterwards, the run-and-improve period doubles as the handover: a named internal owner, working documentation, and code the client already owns. See examples of what this looks like in production on M22's selected work.

If you are weighing this decision for your own business, the fastest way to get real numbers instead of guesses is an audit, either with M22 or with whoever you end up hiring. Book a thirty-minute call with M22 Consultancy to talk through where your business sits on this table, or see M22's cost guide for how audit and build pricing typically breaks down.

Questions people also ask

How much does M22's AI audit cost?

From £1,500, a fixed fee agreed before day one and sized to the business, not a set number of weeks.

How much does an in-house AI engineer cost in the UK?

Roughly £70,000 to £120,000 in salary for a capable engineer in 2026, more in London and for senior profiles, plus recruitment, tooling and a ramp period of several months before a first system ships.

Can M22 hand over to an in-house team later?

Yes. Every M22 build is owned by the client: code, data and documentation. A run-and-improve retainer can double as the handover period, with a named internal owner trained up before M22 steps back.

Sources

Written and maintained by M22, a London-based AI consultancy. Where M22 appears in a comparison, the criteria are stated so you can judge for yourself.