The AI project brief template: fill this in before you ask for a quote
A one-page template with the nine fields that make three quotes comparable, what to write in each, and the two answers that are allowed to be "we do not know".
A one-page brief with nine fields turns three incomparable quotes into three answers to the same question. The fields are the job, who does it, the volume, the systems and their access, what done means, the number it should move, the budget range, the decision-maker and the deadline with its reason. Two of them are allowed to be unknown, and saying so is more useful than guessing, because a firm that knows what you have not measured can price finding out.
Copy the nine headings below into a document. An afternoon filling them in saves two weeks of calls where three firms describe three different projects back to you.
Keep it to a page. The point is not completeness, it is that every firm is reading the same facts.
1. The job
What to write. What happens today, in order, in the words of the person who does it. Start when something arrives and end when it is finished.
Example. When a customer emails about a delivery problem, Maya opens the order in the admin tool, checks the carrier site, writes a reply from a rough template, and logs the outcome in the CRM.
What not to write. The solution. "An AI agent for support" is not this field.
2. Who does it, and what else they do
What to write. Names or roles, how many people, and what the job displaces. A task absorbing a specialist's afternoons is a different proposition from one filling a junior's morning.
3. Volume
What to write. How many times a day or week, and how it varies. Thirty a day, two hundred on a Monday.
This field decides whether the project is worth doing at all, and it is the one most often left out.
4. The systems, and how long access takes
What to write. List every system the job touches. For each, say whether it has an API, who internally knows it, and how long credentials usually take.
Be honest about the last part. Access is the single most common cause of overrun and everybody's plan is better for knowing it is six weeks.
5. What done means
What to write. The sentence that ends the project.
Two versions exist. "A working demonstration we can show the board" and "in production, used daily by the team, monitored, with somebody here who can change it". Pick one. Most later disputes are about this field.
6. The number it should move, and what it is today
What to write. The metric and its current value. Hours a week, cases per person, days to close.
This one is allowed to be "we do not know". Say so explicitly rather than guessing. A firm that knows you have not measured it can quote for measuring it, which is a smaller piece of work than the build and often changes what gets built.
7. Budget range
What to write. A range. Not a ceiling disguised as a range.
The standard advice is to withhold this. In a market where six of seven firms publish no prices, withholding yours means both sides are guessing, and you will get a proposal priced on what the firm usually sells.
8. Who decides
What to write. One name. The person who can answer a question in a day without convening anybody.
This one is sometimes "not yet agreed". If so, that is the first thing to fix, and it will cost you more weeks than any technical problem on the list.
9. The deadline, and why
What to write. The date and the reason behind it.
"End of Q2" is a wish. "Before the renewal conversation with our largest customer on 14 March" is a constraint, and a firm can plan against it, tell you it is not achievable, or propose the smaller version that is.
Send it to everyone on the same day
Same document, same day, same questions. Twelve of those questions, as a scorecard, fit on one page beside this one.
What a good reply looks like
A firm that reads this properly comes back with questions about fields 4 and 6, because those are where the estimate lives. A firm that comes back with a proposal and no questions has priced its assumptions rather than your project.
One limit worth stating
A brief this specific can foreclose the better idea. If you describe the job tightly and the approach tightly, you have hired yourself and are paying somebody to type. Be exact about fields 1 to 5, which are facts about your company, and deliberately silent on how it should be built. If a firm's first answer is an architecture rather than a question, you have learned something anyway.
If filling this in is the hard part
That is a common and useful finding. Most companies can write fields 1, 2 and 5 easily, stall on 3 and 4, and have never had a reason to know 6.
The gap is the work. Book the call, bring whatever you have filled in, and we will go through the empty fields with you before anybody quotes anything.
If you have a budget, a deadline, and no clear answer on which AI project deserves either, that is the conversation to have.
Book the callWritten by
Radwan Altaf
Radwan runs AISynq. Before that he delivered software inside enterprise programmes at DHL, AT&T, DirecTV and Accenture, which is where the habit of measuring a result against its baseline came from. More about the firm.
Read next
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- How to brief an AI project so the quotes are comparableFive things to write down before you contact anyone, and why a vague brief produces three quotes that differ threefold for reasons nobody can explain.
- How to get budget approved for an AI projectWhat a finance director actually needs to see, the three numbers that carry an approval, and why the AI framing is usually what sinks it.
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