How would you scope and price a paid AI consulting engagement within this client budget?

A fictional distributor wants to reduce invoice-handling effort and has a maximum budget of $55,000 for six weeks. The CFO hopes for a 20% reduction but has no measured baseline. The client can provide 200 authorized invoice examples covering ten vendors, a finance reviewer for four hours per week, and access to observe the current process. No production ERP write access is available.

Your consultancy requires at least 35% engagement gross margin after direct delivery cost and the stated contingency reserve. Two possible scopes are supplied below; the six-week option includes discovery. Fees exclude taxes. All rates are fictional fully loaded internal delivery costs, not client billing rates or market benchmarks. Ignore other firm overhead for this exercise.

The diagnostic requires an additional $1,800 contingency reserve. The evaluated prototype requires a $3,800 reserve. These reserves cover incidental tools and bounded extra work; budget and available team days must both be respected. The prototype extracts invoice fields into a reviewer queue in a test environment, with no autonomous payment or production integration. The client expects a concrete proposal now.