§ 01The engagements
01 · Entry point · Fixed fee
AI Governance Readiness Review
Starting at$15,000 USD
2 to 3 weeks · fixed fee · remote or on-site
Find the governance, risk, and compliance gaps before AI scales into production, not after the first incident.
- Executive discovery sessions with the people accountable for AI.
- A governance and model-risk gap assessment against the Five-Gate Deployment Model and the Governance Maturity Model.
- A review of policies, controls, and lines of accountability.
- A risk register with a prioritized remediation roadmap.
- A 90-day priority action plan.
Best forHealthcare, finance, telecom, and government teams preparing to deploy or expand AI, where every decision has to be auditable and defensible. A clearly scoped, low-friction way to begin that sets up the implementation work that follows.
MESA Self-AssessmentFive-Gate ModelGovernance Maturity ModelAI Vendor Risk FrameworkAIRP
02 · Design · Fixed fee
Regulated AI Architecture Sprint
Starting at$30,000 USD
4 to 6 weeks · fixed fee · design & handoff
Design the target architecture for LLMs, agents, RAG, observability, and the compliance controls, so a team moves from experiment to production without building it twice.
- A current-state and target-state architecture review.
- An LLM routing and model-selection strategy, the NexusCore gateway pattern.
- Agent orchestration and workflow design, the planner-executor-verifier-generator pattern.
- A security, logging, auditability, and observability blueprint.
- An implementation backlog and a clean engineering handoff.
Best forCTOs, product leaders, and platform teams that already know what they want to build and need a sound technical and governance design before they commit. Both strategic and concrete, so the technical value is visible without a full transformation program.
NexusCore routingPEVG agentsAgentic RAGEvidence-grade observabilityPolicy-as-code
03 · Ongoing · Monthly retainer
Enterprise AI Advisory Retainer
From$12,000 USD / mo
3-month minimum · renewable monthly or quarterly
Executive-level guidance and oversight as you operationalize AI: a senior architect in the room for the decisions that are expensive to get wrong.
- Monthly executive advisory calls.
- Architecture and governance reviews on live initiatives.
- Priority support on vendor, model, and policy decisions.
- Review of AI roadmaps, initiatives, and risks.
- Optional participation in steering committees or working groups.
Best forEnterprises running multiple AI initiatives, or internal teams that want a fractional Chief AI Officer rather than a full-time hire. The relationship that keeps a governed platform governed after launch.
Fractional Chief AI OfficerVendor & model reviewPARA operationsGovernance oversight
§ 02How the pricing works
You are not paying for hours.
You are paying for risk reduction, implementation clarity, and executive-grade judgment in regulated AI environments. The fees below are starting points; the final scope is set against your data residency, your regulators, and your risk appetite.
Fixed feesThe Readiness Review and the Architecture Sprint are quoted as fixed fees, because project-based pricing is the honest way to price clearly scoped strategy and design work. You know the cost before it starts.
Monthly retainerThe Advisory Retainer is a monthly fee with a three-month minimum, because ongoing oversight is a relationship, not a deliverable. Renewable monthly or quarterly.
If hourly is neededWhere an engagement genuinely needs hourly work, it is anchored at $350 to $500 USD per hour. In practice a fixed-scope package serves a regulated program better and protects both sides from low-value task billing.
Why these numbersThe pricing signals the level of value: enterprise architecture, governance, model risk, and production AI in regulated markets. Underpricing would weaken that signal to the serious buyers these engagements are built for.