Pricing is the single skill that determines whether AI advisory work is a sustainable career or a sequence of underpaid weekends. We have watched extremely capable practitioners, engineers, marketers, ex-consultants, undersell their first engagements by a factor of three because they had not yet developed a vocabulary for the value they were creating. The goal of this essay is to install that vocabulary in about twenty minutes of reading.
We will cover four pricing models, the situations each one is appropriate for, the situations each one is not appropriate for, and three concrete packages you can put on a website today. None of this is theoretical: every number below was actually charged, in Canadian dollars, by a CBEA member on a real engagement in the second half of 2025.
The four models, briefly.
1. Hourly.
The starter model, and the model we recommend least often. Hourly billing is appropriate when the scope is genuinely ambiguous and the client wants to pay for exploration, or when you are very early in your practice and pricing certainty is more important than upside. The risk is that you cap your own earnings at the ceiling of your hourly rate, which for most CAA™ holders in their first year lands somewhere between $150 and $300 CAD. The other risk is that hourly billing punishes you for being good at your job: faster, more leveraged work earns you less, not more.
2. Fixed-fee project.
The workhorse model, and the one we use for most discrete advisory engagements. A fixed-fee project has a defined scope, a defined deliverable, a defined timeline, and a defined price. The client gets predictability; you get the right to be efficient. Almost every CBEA member's first paid engagement after the program is a fixed-fee project, and we are explicit about why: it is the easiest model to communicate, the hardest to under-charge on (because the price is set up front, in cold blood), and the cleanest to deliver against.
3. Monthly retainer.
The model that produces a real business, not a series of one-off contracts. A retainer is a recurring fee in exchange for a defined scope of ongoing work, usually some combination of standing weekly meetings, a defined number of monthly deliverables, and on-call availability for tactical questions. Retainers are how an advisor turns one good engagement into eighteen months of revenue. We recommend introducing a retainer offer no later than the second or third client engagement.
4. Outcome-based or value-based pricing.
The model with the highest theoretical ceiling and the highest practical risk. Outcome-based pricing ties part of your fee to a measurable result, revenue lifted, hours saved, cost reduced. It is appropriate when the outcome is unambiguously attributable to your work, when the client is sophisticated enough to honour the agreement, and when you have enough engagements behind you to absorb a bad outcome on one of them. For most first-year CAA™ holders, we recommend deferring outcome-based pricing until at least year two, but knowing it exists shapes how confidently you price your fixed-fee work.
Three packages you can put on a page tomorrow.
Package A, AI Discovery & Audit. $4,500 CAD, fixed-fee, two weeks.
A scoped two-week discovery engagement for a Canadian SMB or department head. Includes a current-state audit (what is in use today, by whom, at what cost), three to five priority opportunity areas, a privacy and risk overview under PIPEDA, and a written executive summary with recommended next steps. Delivered as a forty-five-minute presentation plus a fifteen-page document. The most common entry-point engagement we see, and the one we recommend our members lead with on a new website.
Package B, AI Workflow Build. $12,000 CAD, fixed-fee, four to six weeks.
A scoped build of one or two production AI workflows, typically a custom assistant, an automated pipeline, or a multi-step agent, delivered to a Canadian SMB or specific department inside a larger firm. Includes the workflow itself, documentation, a privacy review, a training session for the internal team, and thirty days of post-launch support. This is the package that turns a discovery engagement into real revenue, both for the advisor and for the client.
Package C, Fractional AI Advisor. $4,000 CAD per month, six-month minimum.
A monthly retainer for ongoing AI advisory across a Canadian SMB. Includes a weekly leadership meeting, two prioritized workflow builds or revisions per month, asynchronous availability for tactical questions, and a quarterly executive review. We see this model most often with founder-led businesses between $5M and $50M in revenue, the size at which AI deployment is meaningful but a full-time AI lead is not yet justified. Six-month minimum is the right floor; do not go shorter.
How to talk about price.
One pattern, repeated. When a client asks the price, name it once, name it confidently, and then say nothing. Do not justify, do not pre-emptively defend, do not soften with a discount before they have objected. The silence after a price is the most useful diagnostic in the entire conversation: a serious client will either accept it, propose a scope adjustment, or move on. None of those outcomes are bad. The bad outcome is the one where you talk yourself out of a fair price before the client ever had a chance to react to it.
The single most useful exercise we run with members on this topic is also the simplest. Pick the package you are most comfortable with, usually the Discovery audit, and quote it out loud, into a mirror, ten times in a row. By the seventh time, the number stops feeling large. By the tenth, you have internalized the price. The next client conversation you have, the number comes out clean.
One last note on Canadian context.
Canadian clients are, on average, more price-sensitive than American ones, and more relational. They will negotiate, and they will pay slower. Build that into your terms: ask for fifty percent up front on Package B, ask for a quarterly retainer on Package C, and use net-fifteen invoicing, not net-thirty, as your default. The first time a Canadian client suggests they would prefer to pay you in three monthly installments instead of two, you have a real practice on your hands.
The CBEA Editorial Board, Toronto