The verdict in three sentences
A firm of 90 consultants sitting on 40,000 documents (proposals, deliverables, methods, lessons learned) reinvents what it already produced every week. A custom RAG AI assistant (retrieval-augmented generation) costs EUR 25,000 to 60,000 (about GBP 21,000 to 51,000) in 2026, plus EUR 300 to 1,500 a month in API and hosting costs within Europe. With 3 hours saved per consultant per week, the project pays back within weeks, provided per-engagement access rights are built in from day one.
Why RAG rather than a general chatbot
A consumer assistant does not know your deliverables and should not receive them without a contractual framework. RAG indexes your documents in a vector database, retrieves the relevant passages for each question, then asks the language model to answer citing its sources. The consultant clicks the reference and opens the original deliverable in SharePoint or Google Drive.
The critical point in a consulting firm is confidentiality: a consultant must not see deliverables for a competing client they were never staffed on. The assistant therefore inherits the rights of the existing document system and filters results by engagement, client and confidentiality level.
| Option (2026 order of magnitude) | Set-up cost | Monthly cost (90 users) | Per-engagement rights | Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copilot built into the office suite | EUR 0 to 5,000 | EUR 2,300 to 2,800 | Inherited, hard to filter | Per vendor contract |
| Off-the-shelf RAG SaaS platform | EUR 5,000 to 15,000 | EUR 1,500 to 4,000 | Partial | EU/UK as option |
| Custom RAG, EU/UK-hosted model API | EUR 25,000 to 45,000 | EUR 300 to 1,000 | Fine-grained, by engagement and client | EU/UK |
| Custom RAG, self-hosted model | EUR 45,000 to 60,000 | EUR 900 to 1,500 (GPU) | Fine-grained | Your servers or EU/UK cloud |
What a EUR 25,000 - 60,000 project includes
A typical project splits into four work packages. Ingestion connects SharePoint, Drive or the file server, extracts text from PDF, PowerPoint and Excel, then chunks and indexes. Retrieval combines semantic and keyword search, with result re-ranking. The interface plugs into Teams or a web portal, with clickable citations. Governance adds access rights, audit logs, optional client-name anonymisation and answer-quality evaluation.
| Work package | Indicative budget | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Scoping, test corpus and evaluation sets | EUR 3,000 to 6,000 | 2 weeks |
| Connectors and ingestion (40,000 documents) | EUR 6,000 to 14,000 | 3 weeks |
| Hybrid search and sourced generation | EUR 7,000 to 15,000 | 3 weeks |
| Teams or web interface | EUR 4,000 to 10,000 | 2 weeks |
| Per-engagement rights, audit, UK GDPR compliance | EUR 5,000 to 15,000 | 2 to 3 weeks |
| Total | EUR 25,000 to 60,000 | 10 to 14 weeks |
API costs depend on volume: 90 consultants asking 15 questions a day means roughly 30,000 requests a month, or EUR 300 to 900 depending on the model. Initial corpus indexing is a one-off EUR 100 to 400.
Mini case study
Camilla, operations partner at a London strategy consulting firm, has 90 consultants billed at an average of EUR 1,200 a day, or EUR 150 an hour. With 3 hours saved per consultant per week over 44 weeks, the firm frees 11,880 hours a year. Valuing those hours conservatively at just 30% (time actually reinvested in billable work or pre-sales), the gain reaches EUR 534,600 a year. The project costs EUR 48,000 plus EUR 12,000 a year to run: payback in under two months.
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FAQ
Are our documents used to train the model?
No, with RAG the model is not trained on your data: it only reads the passages retrieved at question time. Enterprise API contracts exclude training on your data and guarantee 0 to 30 days retention.
How reliable are the answers?
On a well-indexed corpus, 85 to 92% of answers are rated correct and sourced in testing. Every answer cites its documents, so consultants can verify in 30 seconds.
How do we stay compliant with UK GDPR and client confidentiality?
EU/UK hosting, per-engagement filtering, access logs and a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) are part of the governance package, at EUR 5,000 to 15,000 depending on depth.
Do we need to clean up the document base first?
Minimal sorting is enough: excluding drafts and duplicates often shrinks the corpus by 20 to 35%. The system can also favour versions flagged as final.
How soon will we see results?
A pilot on 5,000 documents and 15 consultants is live in 4 weeks. Full roll-out follows in 6 to 10 weeks.
Let's scope your project. Share your document volume, tools and confidentiality constraints: we will scope a RAG assistant between EUR 25,000 and 60,000, with a pilot in 4 weeks. Detailed quote within 48 h. WhatsApp +221 77 596 93 33.
Mohamed Bah
Fondateur, Kolonell
Passionate about digital and entrepreneurship in Africa, Mohamed has been helping Sénégalese businesses with their digital transformation since 2020. Founder of Kolonell, he believes every SME deserves a professional and accessible online présence.
