M.A.I. Consulting
The market

What else you could buy, what it costs, and where we differ.

Every price on this page is a published list price with a source. We are neither the least expensive option nor the largest. The arithmetic follows, so you can decide without a sales call.

The market we work in

Organisations are being asked about AI faster than they are being helped with it.

Three findings define the gap this practice sits in. None of them is about enthusiasm for AI.

Funders use AI. Few are helping grantees use it.

The Center for Effective Philanthropy surveyed 215 foundation leaders and 451 nonprofit leaders in April 2025. Only about 10% of foundations report supporting grantees on AI implementation, and almost two-thirds of foundations and nonprofits say none or just a few of their staff have a solid understanding of AI. source

Your staff started without you.

Among UK charities, 76% now use AI tools, up from 61% a year earlier source. In a benchmark of 346 nonprofits, 92% use AI and 81% use it individually, without shared workflows source.

The training that exists does not land.

Only 7% of nonprofits report major improvements in organisational capability from AI, and 47% have no AI governance policy source. Small charities name limited digital skills (48%) and lack of training (44%) as their biggest barriers source.

The alternatives

Everything a mission-driven organisation would realistically consider.

Published list prices as of September 2026, in each provider's own currency, sourced underneath. Where a provider publishes no price, the row says so, which is itself a finding.

Doing nothing

the status quo, the option most organisations are on
CHF 0visible cost only
Use continues, undocumented, on personal accounts. Its real cost is the one that does not appear as a line: in the 346-organisation benchmark, 81% use AI individually without shared workflows and 47% have no AI governance policy. source
No policyNo per-team materialNo documentationNot measured

Excludes no one, which is why it prevails by default.

Doing it in-house

an IT memo, a template policy, a colleague's lunch session
4 to 8 staff daysthat rarely get scheduled
Usually a prohibition list and one awareness session. It works where somebody owns it and has the time.
Partial policyNo per-team materialPartial documentationNot measured

Excludes no one. The constraint is capacity, not eligibility.

NTEN Tech Readiness cohort

six-month cohort, 8 to 10 hours a month
Free
Peer cohort, structured curriculum, sector-specific.
No policyNo per-team materialNo documentationNot measured

US-based nonprofits only. Not open to organisations in Europe, MENA or the international sector.

NetHope AI Accelerator

two-year programme
Subsidised
Education, tools, peer community and coaching.
No policyNo per-team materialNo documentationNot measured

Under 100 staff and under USD 10M budget, in named sectors. Excludes larger INGOs, UN bodies and public institutions.

NTEN AI for Nonprofits Certificate

self-paced, up to 12 months
USD 1,000USD 500 for members, per person
An individual professional certificate.
No policyNo per-team materialNo documentationNot measured

Excludes no one, though it certifies one person rather than the organisation.

LinkedIn Learning Teams

USD 379.88per user, per year
Catalogue access to generic courses.
No policyNo per-team materialNo documentationNot measured

Excludes no one, and that is the difficulty. Nothing in it knows your data rules.

Coursera for Teams

USD 399per user, per year
Catalogue access to university-branded courses.
No policyNo per-team materialNo documentationNot measured

Excludes no one. The same catalogue for every organisation.

Section AI Academy

USD 750per seat, teams up to 100
Cohort upskilling in a corporate framing.
No policyNo per-team materialNo documentationPartly measured

Not built for beneficiary data, donor disclosure or safeguarding vocabulary.

Executive AI programmes

MIT xPRO, Berkeley and similar
USD 5,900 to 11,000+per person
Leadership education with strong signal value.
No policyNo per-team materialNo documentationNot measured

Reaches your director. Does not reach the officer who pastes the file.

IAPP AIGP certification

USD 649 to 799 examplus USD 995 to 2,500 training
A recognised individual AI governance credential.
No policyNo per-team materialPartial documentationNot measured

Qualifies a person to write a policy. Does not write one.

AI governance consultancies

USD 15,000 to 90,000typical quoted ranges
Framework, policy, risk tiering and audit artefacts.
PolicyNo per-team materialDocumentationNot measured

Governance-first. Trains no one, so behaviour does not change.

Global consultancies

Not publishedboutique advisory quoted at USD 195k to 235k in year one
Full-stack transformation with board credibility.
PolicyPartial per-team materialDocumentationPartly measured

Will not take a CHF 20,000 engagement. You are not their client.

M.A.I. Consulting

three to ten weeks, whole organisation
Indicative rangeper organisation, once. Run the estimator
Ten-dimension assessment, board-ready policy, organisation-wide session, department labs with playbooks, agents, skills and tools where they pay for themselves, and a re-score at 90 days.
PolicyPer-team materialDocumentationMeasured before and after

Organisations needing model building, data pipelines or thirty trainers next month.

Sources, checked September 2026: NTEN certificate · NTEN cohort · NetHope Accelerator · LinkedIn Learning · Coursera for Teams · Section · executive programmes · IAPP AIGP · governance consulting ranges · CEP, AI With Purpose. Providers change prices; verify before deciding. Volume discounts are common on per-seat platforms and are not reflected in list prices.

The value case

Four costs you are carrying today.

These are line items you can find in your own accounts and your own grant calendar.

One: revenue at risk

A funder asks about your AI governance and you have nothing to send.

while few are helping grantees prepare: only about 10% of foundations report supporting grantees on AI implementation, and almost two-thirds of foundations and nonprofits say none or just a few of their staff have a solid understanding of AI source

The arithmetic here concerns revenue rather than productivity. One mid-size foundation grant is worth more than this entire engagement, usually by a multiple. If an unanswerable AI-governance question delays a single application by one cycle, the cost of that delay exceeds the cost of never having the gap. The policy, the tool inventory and the assessment report are the answer to that question, and they take eight weeks to produce, which is shorter than most grant cycles and longer than most deadlines allow once the question has already arrived.

Two: the per-seat trap

A catalogue licence for 150 staff costs more every year than fixing this once.

150 staff, list prices, one year

Coursera for Teams, 150 × USD 399/user/yearUSD 59,850
LinkedIn Learning Teams, 150 × USD 379.88/user/yearUSD 56,982
M.A.I., 150-staff NGO, assessment, umbrella and department-specific training and policy, once≈ CHF 33,000
A generic catalogue costs close to twice the full engagement, every year, and at the end of it you hold no policy, no per-team material, no attendance record and no score. When the licence lapses you have nothing. When this engagement ends you own the artefacts. The M.A.I. figure is the estimator’s indicative output for that scenario; run it for your own organisation.

List prices; platforms discount at volume, and you should ask them to. The structure of the comparison does not change: theirs is a per-person annual rent, ours is a per-organisation one-off.
Three: the recoverable hours

Proposal and report drafting is your largest recoverable cost, and it is countable.

A full-time grant writer runs roughly USD 98,000 a year fully loaded. Outsourced, a foundation proposal is USD 1,500–5,000 and a federal application USD 5,000–15,000+. Most organisations pay neither. They absorb it as programme staff time, which is why it never appears as a line and never gets managed.

Why this is measurable and most AI claims are not. You already know how many proposals and donor reports you produced last year. Count the hours on the next three before we start and on three after. That is the number, and it comes from your own accounts. We will not put a percentage in a proposal, because an ROI figure for AI training quoted before your documents have been seen has no basis.

Four: the exposure you cannot price

Nobody in the organisation can say what has been put into a consumer tool.

Where AI use is individual and undocumented, the question has no answer inside the organisation. In a benchmark of 346 nonprofits, 81% use AI individually, without shared workflows, and 47% have no AI governance policy at all. source If nobody has asked, nobody knows, and the exposure is carried without sight of it.

For you this is not a fine. It is a safeguarding failure involving the people you exist to protect, discovered by a donor or a journalist rather than by you. There is no number on that. There is a number on preventing it, and it is on this page.

Where we differ

Six differences, and which of them a competitor could copy.

None of these is “we are more tailored.” We have sorted them by how hard they are to copy, and we say so, because a buyer who sees that admission can trust the rest.

Structural

1 · The free options exclude you

The best free programme is open to US-based nonprofits only. The main subsidised accelerator caps at under 100 staff and under USD 10M in named sectors. A Geneva international body, a 200-person INGO, a public institution or a MENA organisation is outside all of it. We are not competing with free, because free is not available to you.

Built · accumulates

2 · The instrument is ours

Ten dimensions, sixty scored questions, mapped to ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act, GDPR, OECD and UNESCO instruments. Published free. Every organisation scored adds to a dataset that, over time, becomes sector benchmarking no one else holds.

Accumulated

3 · The sector's vocabulary, in three languages

Donor reporting, beneficiary data, safeguarding, disclosure to funders, DPIA, and delivery in English, French or Arabic without translation. Certified specifically in teaching AI fluency and in AI fluency for nonprofits, as well as in using it. Others can get the certificates. The combination, based in Geneva, is rare.

Design choice

4 · You keep the assets

A lapsed licence leaves nothing. This leaves a policy in force, a page per department, a tool inventory, an attendance record and two scores. Others could work this way; platform business models structurally cannot.

Copyable, not yet copied

5 · All three parts in one engagement

Platforms train but write no policy. Governance consultancies write policy but train no one. A governance firm could add training tomorrow. In this price band, none has.

Copyable in a week

6 · An open estimator, charged per organisation

Anyone could show their prices before a call and charge once per organisation instead of per person per year. Almost no one does: platforms because it breaks their model, consultancies because it removes their negotiating room. We do it because not knowing whether this is a CHF 5,000 or a CHF 500,000 conversation is the main reason buyers leave.

And where we lose

If you need model fine-tuning, data engineering or custom software, we do none of it. We configure agents and tools on the platforms you already use, and stop there. If you need thirty trainers across four countries next month, we cannot staff it. If your team has fewer than ten people, a small-group course fits better than a full engagement, and we will say so on the call. Those limits are real.

Our recommendation, if you are weighing this up. Do the free things first. Take the AI Readiness Check on this site, which is free and takes twelve minutes. If you are a US-based nonprofit, apply to the free cohort. If you are under 100 staff in an eligible sector, apply to the accelerator. Read the framework, which is public.

Return when you reach the limit all of those share: none of them can write your policy, use your team's documents, clear your data rules, or produce the evidence file your funder asks for. That wall is where the paid work starts, and not before.

Establish in twelve minutes, free, whether this applies to you.

The assessment scores you across ten dimensions and tells you what to fix first. You keep the report whether or not you ever speak to us.