The hidden costs that make evaluating AI more expensive than it looks.
Less visible is the cost of deciding what to use.
In many organisations, the process of evaluating a single vendor involves multiple teams across engineering, security, procurement, legal, and architecture.
Each team contributes necessary oversight.Collectively, they introduce significant cost.
Evaluation is rarely owned by a single function.
Engineering teams assessing technical feasibility
Security teams reviewing risk exposure
Legal teams reviewing contractual terms
Procurement teams managing onboarding
Architecture teams assessing system fit
Each of these activities is rational.
However, because they are not coordinated through a shared system, they operate sequentially rather than in parallel.
The Fully Loaded Cost of Evaluation
When internal time is accounted for, the cost of evaluating a single AI capability is often substantial.
Engineering time alone can involve multiple weeks of effort.
Security and legal review add additional cycles.
Environment provisioning introduces further delay.
In aggregate, the fully-loaded cost of evaluation can exceed £180,000 to £220,000 per vendor.
This cost is rarely tracked explicitly.
It is absorbed into existing teams and budgets.
From Evaluation Cost to Decision Quality
The objective of evaluation is not simply to reduce cost.
It is to improve the quality of decisions.
In the absence of structured evaluation systems, organisations face a trade-off:
Or move slowly with high coordination cost
Most enterprises have well-developed systems for managing:
However, there is limited infrastructure for managing evaluation as a repeatable, governed activity.
Toward Evaluation as Infrastructure
A different approach is to treat evaluation as infrastructure rather than as a series of ad hoc activities.
Coordinate evaluation activities across teams
Improve both speed and decision quality
Over time, this shifts evaluation from a hidden cost centre to a controlled, measurable capability.
As AI ecosystems continue to expand, the number of potential vendors and capabilities will increase.
In this environment, the cost of not having structured evaluation systems will also increase.
Organisations that treat evaluation as infrastructure are likely to:
Move more quickly from evaluation to production
In practice, this becomes a question not only of efficiency, but of competitive advantage.
→ Learn how NayaOne enables structured, evidence-based technology evaluation.