The verdict in three sentences
A Boston consulting firm with 90 consultants sitting on 15,000 archived deliverables loses hours every week searching for methods and case references it has already produced. A custom RAG assistant (retrieval-augmented generation) typically costs USD 30,000 to 70,000, plus USD 400 to 1,500 a month in model usage, and ships in 10 weeks. With indexes hosted in your own cloud tenant and access rights inherited from SharePoint, the targeted gain of 2 to 4 hours per consultant per week pays the project back within months.
Why document search is so expensive for a firm
A consulting firm's value lies in reusing what it has already learned. Yet deliverables sit in SharePoint, Teams and shared drives with inconsistent naming. A consultant preparing a proposal often spends half a day finding a sector reference or an analysis framework, or ends up rebuilding it.
| Situation | Current search (estimate) | With a RAG assistant | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Find a comparable client reference | 45 to 90 minutes | 1 to 3 minutes, with cited sources | -95% time |
| Prepare a proposal | 1.5 days | 1 day | -30% |
| Onboard a new consultant | 6 to 8 weeks to autonomy | 4 to 5 weeks | -2 to 3 weeks |
| Reuse of internal methods | Low, relies on personal networks | Systematic | Consistent quality |
| Leak risk through consumer chatbots | High (shadow AI usage) | Controlled, internal tool | Compliance |
| Time saved per consultant | 0 | 2 to 4 hours a week | 180 to 360 hours a week in total |
What a RAG assistant contains and what it costs
The principle is simple: documents are chunked, indexed in a vector store, and the language model answers only from retrieved passages, citing its sources. The hard parts are indexing quality, permissions and confidentiality.
| Component | Content | Indicative budget (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Document ingestion | SharePoint and Teams connectors, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel extraction | 6,000 to 12,000 |
| Indexing and search | Chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, metadata | 6,000 to 14,000 |
| Permissions | Inherited SharePoint permissions, query-time filtering | 4,000 to 10,000 |
| Interface | Chat in Teams or web app, clickable citations | 4,000 to 10,000 |
| Quality evaluation | 200-question test set, accuracy measurement | 3,000 to 8,000 |
| Security and compliance | US-region hosting, logging, SOC 2 alignment, client NDA review | 4,000 to 10,000 |
| Training and change management | Workshops, usage guide | 3,000 to 6,000 |
Total: USD 30,000 to 70,000 depending on volume, format diversity and permission requirements.
Confidentiality: the choices that matter
| Choice | Cost-effective option | Most protective option |
|---|---|---|
| Index hosting | Firm's existing cloud tenant (Azure, AWS) | Dedicated private environment |
| Language model | Major provider API, no training on your data | Self-hosted open-weight model |
| Monthly usage cost | USD 400 to 1,000 | USD 1,000 to 1,500, plus GPU server |
| Access rights | Inherited from SharePoint | Inherited, plus per-client walls |
| Logging | Queries kept 30 days | Encrypted queries, configurable purge |
| Documentation | Data processing records, vendor review | Formal risk assessment and external audit |
For a firm serving Fortune 500 clients under strict NDAs, strict permission inheritance is non-negotiable: a consultant must never receive, through the assistant, a passage from a file they could not open in SharePoint.
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Take David, partner at a consulting firm in Boston (illustrative case). His 90 consultants save an average of 2 hours a week with the assistant, 180 hours in total. Valued conservatively at USD 90 internal cost, that is USD 16,200 a week, about USD 713,000 over 44 working weeks. Even counting only a quarter of that as truly converted into billable time or extra proposals, USD 178,000, a project at USD 50,000 plus USD 12,000 of annual usage pays back in about 4 months.
FAQ
Are our documents used to train the models?
No, enterprise APIs from major providers contractually exclude training on your data, and indexes stay in your environment. Check it in the contract and record it in your vendor risk review.
Can the assistant make up answers?
The risk exists, which is why sources must be cited and a confidence threshold makes the assistant say it does not know. On a 200-question test set, the usual target is above 85% correct, sourced answers.
How long does indexing 15,000 deliverables take?
Initial indexing takes 2 to 5 days depending on formats, then new documents are added continuously. Embedding costs stay low, often under USD 250 for the whole archive.
What happens when a consultant leaves a project?
Rights follow SharePoint: once access is removed, the assistant stops serving those passages. Permission sync usually runs every 15 to 60 minutes.
Can we use it directly in Teams?
Yes, the assistant can be deployed as a Teams app, which drives adoption. Budget USD 4,000 to 10,000 for the interface, Teams or web.
Let's scope your project. Document volume, sources, confidentiality requirements and target date: we estimate your AI assistant with a 10-week plan. 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.
