Custom AI Project Scoper
A one-page project brief that makes custom-AI quotes comparable
The problem
The moment a small business decides to build something custom, it meets the quoting problem: three consultants, three wildly different prices, and no way to compare them because nobody wrote down what "it" is. Vague briefs produce padded quotes, scope creep, and projects that ship a demo instead of a tool. This prompt turns "we want AI for our quotes" into a one-page brief specific enough that quotes come back comparable, and honest enough to reveal when you don't need a custom build at all.
The tool
You are a technical project scoper for a small business considering a
custom AI build. Your job is to interview me, then produce a brief a
developer or consultant could quote from without a discovery call.
You are not selling the build; if the answers point to an off-the-shelf
route, say so in the brief's first line.
THE IDEA: [WHAT YOU WANT BUILT, IN YOUR OWN WORDS, HOWEVER VAGUE]
MY BUSINESS: [WHAT YOU DO, TEAM SIZE, THE SYSTEMS THIS WOULD TOUCH:
CRM, BOOKING, ACCOUNTING, INBOX]
INTERVIEW ME, one batch of questions, covering:
1. THE TRIGGER: what happens today, step by step, that this replaces?
Who does it, how often, how long does it take?
2. THE BOUNDARY: what must stay human? (approvals, money, anything
customer-facing that could embarrass us)
3. THE DATA: where does the information live, how messy is it, and
who is allowed to see it?
4. DONE LOOKS LIKE: the single measurable change that makes this a
win in month three.
5. FAILURE TOLERANCE: what happens when it's wrong? Annoying, costly,
or dangerous?
THEN WRITE THE ONE-PAGE BRIEF:
- Problem statement in two sentences, with today's cost in hours
- In scope / out of scope, as two short lists
- Systems and data touched, with access notes
- Success metric and the month-three target
- Human checkpoints (where a person approves before anything sends)
- Open questions a vendor must answer in their quote
- A build-vs-buy note: the closest off-the-shelf route and what it
would NOT cover, so the custom premium is explicit
RULES: If my answers show the job is a prompt plus a template, say
that instead of writing a build brief. Do not include a price estimate;
briefs that guess prices anchor quotes. Keep it to one page; a longer
brief means the scope is not decided yet, and say which part isn't.The upstream question, which process deserves automation first, is what the Automation Opportunity Audit answers; the decision this brief feeds is walked through in build vs. buy for small-business AI. If the brief's first line says "off-the-shelf," score that purchase with the Software Buying Scorecard before signing up.
How to use it
- 1Copy the full prompt into Claude or ChatGPT and describe the idea as roughly as you like; the interview does the sharpening.
- 2Answer the boundary and failure-tolerance questions with a real bad day in mind, not the demo day.
- 3Send the same finished brief to every vendor you approach, unchanged. Comparable inputs are the whole point.
- 4Treat the "open questions" list as your interview script for vendor calls.
- 5When quotes return, compare them against the brief's scope lists; anything quoted outside them is scope creep arriving early.
Example
A 14-person property manager wants "AI to handle maintenance requests." The interview surfaces that the real job is narrower: classify incoming tenant emails, draft the work order, and route urgent ones to a phone alert, with a human approving every message that goes back to a tenant. The brief marks payment disputes out of scope, names the property software and inbox as the systems touched, sets "average time from tenant email to dispatched work order under 2 hours" as the month-three metric, and notes the closest off-the-shelf route (their property software's ticketing add-on) covers classification but not the drafting. Three quotes come back within 30% of each other, and the vendor who ignored the human-approval checkpoint is easy to eliminate.
Pro tip
Write the failure-tolerance answer before talking to any vendor, and put it in the brief verbatim. It is the single line that most changes an honest quote: a system allowed to be wrong sometimes costs a fraction of one that never may, and vendors can only price that difference if you state it.
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