M.A.I. Consulting
The market, honestly

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

Every price on this page is a published list price with a source. We are not the cheapest option and we are not the biggest. Here is the arithmetic, 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. They are not helping you use it.

The Center for Effective Philanthropy surveyed 451 nonprofit leaders and 215 foundation leaders in September 2025. 81% of foundations report some AI use. Only 11% provide AI implementation support to nonprofits, and fewer than 20% of nonprofits say a funder has even discussed AI with them.

Your staff started without you.

76% of UK charities now use AI tools, up from 61% a year earlier; 92% of US nonprofits report some use, 81% of it ad hoc and undocumented. Around 88% of professionals have put work information into public chatbots, a third of it customer or beneficiary data. 47% of nonprofits have no AI governance policy.

The training that exists does not land.

Only 7% of nonprofits report major impact from AI, and over 90% of nonprofit professionals say they feel unprepared. Among organisations not yet using it, the barriers named are training (48%) and not knowing where to start (44%). Training gets about 1% of nonprofit technology budgets. Adding tools raises productivity to about three, then reduces it (BCG / UC Riverside, 2026).

The alternatives

Everything a mission-driven organisation would realistically consider.

Prices are published list prices as of September 2026, in the currency each provider quotes. Sources are linked below the table. Where a provider does not publish a price, the table says so — that is itself a finding.

Option What you get Published price Policy Per-team
material
Evidence
file
Measured
before/after
Who it excludes
Doing nothing
the status quo — the option most organisations are on
Use continues, undocumented, on personal accounts CHF 0
visible cost
NoNoNoNo Nobody — which is why it wins by default. Its cost is the one you cannot see: 81% ad hoc use, nothing to send a funder, exposure carried blind
Doing it in-house
an IT memo, a template policy, a colleague's lunch session
Usually a prohibition list and one awareness session 4–8 staff days
that rarely get scheduled
PartialNoPartialNo Works if someone owns it and has the time. 47% of organisations still have no policy — that is the usual outcome
NTEN Tech Readiness cohort
6-month cohort, 8–10 h/month
Peer cohort, structured curriculum, sector-specific Free NoNoNoNo US-based nonprofits only. Not open to organisations based in Europe, MENA or the international sector
NetHope AI Accelerator
two-year programme
Education, tools, peer community, coaching Subsidised NoNoNoNo 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
Individual professional certificate USD 1,000
USD 500 members · per person
NoNoNoNo Nobody — but it certifies one person, not the organisation
LinkedIn Learning Teams Catalogue access, generic courses USD 379.88
per user, per year
NoNoNoNo Nobody — and that is the problem. Nothing in it knows your data rules
Coursera for Teams Catalogue access, university-branded courses USD 399
per user, per year
NoNoNoNo Nobody. Same catalogue for every organisation on earth
Section AI Academy Cohort upskilling, corporate framing USD 750
per seat, teams to 100
NoNoNoPartial Not built for beneficiary data, donor disclosure or safeguarding vocabulary
Executive AI programmes
MIT xPRO, Berkeley and similar
Leadership education, strong signal value USD 5,900–11,000+
per person
NoNoNoNo Reaches your director. Does not reach the officer who actually pastes the file
IAPP AIGP certification Recognised individual AI governance credential USD 649–799 exam
+ USD 995–2,500 training
NoNoPartialNo Qualifies a person to write a policy. Does not write one
AI governance consultancies Framework, policy, risk tiering, audit artefacts USD 15,000–90,000
typical quoted ranges
YesNoYesNo Compliance-first. Trains nobody, so behaviour does not change
Global consultancies Full-stack transformation, board credibility Not published
boutique advisory quoted at USD 195k–235k, year one
YesPartialYesPartial Will not take a CHF 20,000 engagement. You are not their client
M.A.I. Consulting — Adoption
~8 weeks, whole organisation
Ten-dimension assessment, board-ready policy, org-wide session, four department labs with cheatsheets, re-score at 90 days CHF 19,500
per organisation, once
YesYesYesYes 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 things this actually costs you today.

Not "you should be using AI." 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.

Foundations are adding AI questions to due diligence while, on their own admission, almost none of them are helping grantees prepare: 81% of foundations use AI internally, 11% support nonprofits in implementing it. You are being assessed on something nobody has offered to help you with.

The arithmetic is not about 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. Adoption — whole organisation, onceCHF 19,500
A generic catalogue costs roughly two and a half times the 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.

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 is yours, not ours. We will not put a percentage in a proposal, because anyone who quotes you an ROI figure for AI training before seeing your documents is guessing.

Four — the exposure you cannot price

Someone has already pasted a beneficiary file into a consumer chatbot.

Not as a hypothetical: about 88% of professionals have put work information into public AI tools, a third of them customer or beneficiary data, and two-thirds have done it believing it was not permitted. 47% of nonprofits have no AI governance policy at all. If you have not asked, you do not know, and you are carrying it either way.

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 actually 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 us admit that trusts 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 — 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 nobody else holds.

Accumulated

3 · The sector's vocabulary, in three languages

Donor reporting, beneficiary data, safeguarding, disclosure to funders, DPIA — and delivery natively in English, French or Arabic. Certified specifically in teaching AI fluency and in AI fluency for nonprofits, not only in using it. Others can get the certificates. The combination, based in Geneva, is rare.

Design choice

4 · You keep assets, not access

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 — nobody has yet

5 · All three parts in one engagement

Platforms train but write no policy. Governance consultancies write policy but train nobody. A governance firm could add training tomorrow. In this price band, none has.

Copyable in a week

6 · Published prices, charged per organisation

Anyone could publish their prices and charge once per organisation instead of per person per year. Almost nobody 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 deployment, we do none of it. If you need thirty trainers across four countries next month, we cannot staff it. If your organisation is under 20 people, a free course is probably enough and we will say so on the call. Those are real, and pretending otherwise would waste your time and ours.

The honest recommendation, if you are weighing this up. Do the free things first. Take our assessment, 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 — it is public.

Come back when you hit the wall 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.

Rule us out in twelve minutes, free.

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.