The AI Opportunity Audit: a two-week AI readiness assessment that ends with working software

Updated July 2026

$4,500 to $7,500 fixed. Two weeks. Ends with a ranked roadmap and a working proof of concept. 100% of the fee credits against a pilot signed within 90 days.

Most AI audits are a disguised sales call: a questionnaire, a workshop, and a PDF that says "consider chatbots" with a list of tools the auditor resells. The most common buyer complaint in this market, in almost these exact words, is "a $1,000 generic AI audit gave us vague ideas, random tool suggestions, and no ownership plan."

The Tavoko Opportunity Audit is built against that complaint. You do not get a recommendation to explore AI. You get a ranked, costed roadmap of the automation opportunities in your specific business, and you get one of them running as a working proof of concept before we invoice the final milestone. If we cannot demonstrate the opportunity with software, we do not consider the audit finished.

Who this is for

Companies roughly $5M to $500M in revenue that know AI should be doing real work in the business but have no internal AI talent to make it real. Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses research found 73% of small businesses want more implementation help; the barrier is the skills gap, not budget or belief. Our audit clients are typically dental groups, law firms, insurance agencies, ecommerce brands, manufacturers, and accounting firms, but the shape of the problem matters more than the industry: multiple systems, real compliance exposure, and workflows that live in people's heads.

Who this is NOT for

Be honest with yourself before spending $4,500:

If you want a simple website chatbot or one small, well-defined automation, you do not need an audit. Ask for a Quick Build instead: $2,500 to $7,500 fixed, done in a week or two, built to the same standard and you own it.
If you already know exactly what to build, have clean data, and can self-manage a contractor, you do not need an audit. You need a builder. That can be us (Quick Build or pilot, depending on size) or a freelancer you trust.
If you are hoping an audit will convince a skeptical board that AI is magic, we will disappoint you. Sometimes the honest finding is "automate these two things, leave the rest alone."

Not sure which side you are on? Send us the workflow first. The free 10-minute recorded teardown will tell you whether an audit is even worth your money.

Exactly what happens in the two weeks

Days 1-2: Kickoff and access

A 90-minute working session with the owner or operating lead. We agree the scope, identify everyone who actually runs the workflows in question, and get read access to the systems involved. You assign us one point of contact; total demand on your team across the whole engagement is under ten hours.

Days 3-5: Interviews and workflow mapping

We interview every key person one-on-one, 45-60 minutes each, however many the workflow demands. We are not asking "where could you use AI?" We are asking how work actually moves: where it queues, where it gets retyped between systems, where one person's memory is the database. This step is the part no cheap audit includes, and it is why cheap builds fail. A $500 gig cannot discover that your quoting process depends on a spreadsheet only Karen understands.

Days 6-8: Opportunity scoring

Every candidate opportunity gets scored on two axes: ROI (hours saved, revenue protected, error cost avoided, with your numbers, not industry averages) and feasibility (data quality, system access, compliance exposure, tolerance for error). This kills the tool-selection overwhelm problem: 47% of buyers report being overwhelmed by tool choice. You will not get a list of tools. You will get a list of workflows, ranked, with the honest cost to take each one to production.

Days 9-12: We build the proof of concept

We take the top-ranked opportunity and build a working slice of it against your real data and your real systems. Not a mockup, not a video of someone else's demo. Software you can put in front of the person who does the job today and ask, "would this actually help?"

Why we insist on this: MIT's NANDA study found 95% of GenAI pilots show no P&L impact, and Gartner predicts more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027. The gap between "sounds promising in a report" and "works on our data" is where those projects die. We close that gap inside the audit, before you commit pilot money.

Days 13-14: Readout

A working session, not a slide performance. We walk through the ranked roadmap, demo the proof of concept live, and hand over everything: the roadmap document, the PoC code, the workflow maps, the scoring model. You own all of it whether or not you ever hire us again.

What you walk away with

A ranked opportunity roadmap. Every viable automation in scope, scored by ROI and feasibility, with a realistic production cost for each. Realistic matters: buyers underestimate production AI cost by 3-10x (Greenice), which is exactly how a $2,000 prototype becomes a $20,000 problem.
A working proof of concept. The top opportunity, running against your data. This is the deliverable that separates this audit from every report-only readiness assessment on the market.
A written pilot spec. If you proceed, the pilot's single success metric is already defined, in writing, with a fixed price attached.
Full ownership. Code, documents, maps, everything. We sell no software and take no platform commissions, so nothing in the roadmap is there because we profit from recommending it.

Pricing, in plain numbers

AI Opportunity Audit: from $4,500, typically $4,500 to $7,500, fixed. Where you land in the band depends on company size and the number of systems in scope; we quote the exact figure before you sign, and it does not move afterward. Multi-entity organizations and companies over 500 employees are scoped individually.
Fee credit: 100%. Sign a Pilot Build ($15,000 to $40,000 fixed scope, 4-8 weeks) within 90 days of the readout and the entire audit fee comes off the pilot price. If the roadmap is good, the audit effectively costs nothing. If the roadmap tells you not to build anything yet, you spent $4,500 to avoid a five-figure mistake.
No hourly billing. Ever. Fixed scope, fixed price, milestone billing on builds.

For context, solo auditors charge around $2,500 for report-only assessments and mid-market firms charge $10,000 to $25,000 for the same two weeks. We sit in the middle of the band and we are the only tier that hands you running software at the end.

Already bought an AI build that never shipped? The Rescue Audit.

Same price, same two weeks, different question. The Opportunity Audit asks "what should we build?" The Rescue Audit asks "is what we already paid for salvageable?"

If you have a freelancer prototype that never reached production, an offshore team that stopped answering, or an app that demos well and falls over on real workloads, we run the same diagnostic discipline against the existing build: code review (Veracode found roughly half of AI-generated code contains security flaws, so we start there), architecture review, and a reliability assessment. At 95% per-step reliability, a 20-step agent workflow succeeds just 35.8% of the time; most failed builds were doomed by that math before the first line of code, and we will show you where.

You get a straight answer in two weeks: salvage, rebuild, or walk away, with the real cost of each path. The same 100% fee credit applies against a rebuild pilot. Compliance-exposed rescues are our home turf.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from a free AI readiness assessment? Free assessments are lead capture: an eight-minute quiz that always concludes you should buy something. Our free tier is different in kind: a recorded teardown of one real workflow, useful on its own. The paid audit goes where free cannot: interviews with your team, access to your systems, and a proof of concept built on your data.

What if the audit finds nothing worth building? Then the roadmap says so, with reasons, and we will not pitch you a pilot. It is rare, but "fix your data first, revisit in six months" is a finding we have delivered and will deliver again. You still own the workflow maps, which are useful far beyond AI.

Do we have to buy the pilot afterward? No. About the strongest pressure we apply is the 90-day window on the fee credit. The roadmap is written so any competent builder, including a cheaper one, could execute it. That is deliberate; a roadmap that only we can execute would be a sales document, not an audit.

Which AI platforms do you recommend? Whichever one the workflow justifies. We are platform-neutral, we resell nothing, and we earn no commissions. Buyer guides flag auditors who push a proprietary platform as a red flag, and they are right to.

What do you need from our team? One point of contact, one interview with each person who touches the workflow, and read access to the relevant systems. Under ten hours of total staff time across the two weeks.

Is our data safe during the audit? We work under NDA, request read-only access wherever possible, and data handling is designed before access is granted, not improvised after.

Can you just skip the audit and build? If your project is well-defined and low-risk, yes. We will quote it as a Quick Build ($2,500 to $7,500 fixed) or tell you a freelancer is the cheaper path, whichever is actually true. But for work that touches your customers, your money, or more than one system, skipping discovery is how the 95% failure statistic happens. The audit is two weeks of insurance against a much more expensive mistake.

Start free, not with an invoice

Send us one workflow you suspect AI could handle. You will get a 10-minute recorded analysis within a few days: what we would automate, what we would leave alone, and what production honestly costs. If an audit makes sense after that, you will already have seen how we think.