01What does the $999 AI assessment actually include?
Ten business days of work ending in a written document and a 60 minute walkthrough. Inside it: an inventory of every repeated task in your business that a machine could do, the three worth doing first, an hours-per-week and dollars-per-year figure against each, the specific tools each one needs with their real subscription costs, a build estimate for each, and the ones I recommend you do not do. It is written to be handed to another supplier. If you take it elsewhere and get the work done cheaper, the document did its job.
02How does the $999 credit work?
If you go ahead with any automation project with me after the assessment, the full $999 comes off that project. Not a discount code and not a percentage. The whole fee. So the real choice is $999 for the diagnosis alone, or nothing extra if you also want the work done.
03Why is this $999 when other firms charge $3,000?
Canadian consultancies that publish rate cards put a readiness assessment at $1,500 to $5,000, and several open at $2,000 or $3,500. Two things make $999 work. The scope is fixed rather than open, so there is no discovery phase billed by the hour. And the assessment is how I find build work, which means it does not have to carry a consulting margin on its own.
04Do you actually build the automations, or just write the report?
Both, and the report is written so you can take it to somebody else. Most builds land between $2,500 and $12,000 depending on how many systems have to talk to each other. The Canadian agencies publishing numbers quote $2,000 to $8,000 for a single workflow and $2,500 to $25,000 for a project, so this is the same market rate, quoted before you have paid me anything.
05My business is too small for AI. Is it?
Statistics Canada measured 19.9% adoption among businesses with one to four employees against 27.8% among businesses with 100 or more. The gap between the smallest firms and the largest is under eight points, which is a much smaller gap than most owners assume. Small businesses adopt at close to enterprise rates because one person wearing four hats has more repeated work per head, not less.
06Is my data safe if I use these tools?
It depends entirely on which tools, and this is a real question rather than a formality. In May 2026 the Privacy Commissioner of Canada found that OpenAI's initial training of ChatGPT did not comply with Canadian privacy law. PIPEDA applies to personal information in prompts, in retrieval corpora and in model outputs exactly as it applies to a database. Part of the assessment is saying which of your processes can use a consumer chatbot and which need something that keeps the data inside your own systems.
07Can a grant pay for this?
Possibly, and it is worth checking before you pay me. The Ontario Centre of Innovation runs a Digital Modernization and Adoption Plan worth up to $15,000 toward exactly this kind of planning work, for Ontario for-profit SMEs with one to 499 employees, on a first come first served basis while funds last. Eligibility, timing and the application are yours to run, not mine, and I will not claim an approval I cannot control. Tell me on the call if you are applying and I will write the assessment so it lines up with what that application asks for.
08What if the assessment says I should not automate anything?
Then it says that, and you have saved a five figure build. It happens most often with businesses under about five people, where the repeated work is real but does not yet add up to enough hours to pay back a build, and with businesses whose actual problem is that nobody has written down how the work is done. You cannot automate a process that only exists in one person's head.