Put a number on what the delay is costing.
Your AI project has been running for months. The cost is spread across people, allocation, and calendar time, so it is easy to underestimate. Put it in one place and see the burn clearly.
Your project
Burning right now
$33,333every month, whether it ships or not
If it slips one more quarter, add $100,000.
The session
How a $13K-per-week engineer beats a $400K team.
Not because one person outworks four. Because the team is executing while the decisions are still open, and a decision nobody makes costs more than any of them.
Headcount is not the constraint
Adding people to a project with open decisions increases the number of assumptions in flight. It does not increase throughput.
The cost is duration, not rate
One person at a high weekly rate for six weeks is cheap against a team at a low weekly rate for eighteen months.
The output is a working system
You are not buying extra headcount. You are buying one accountable builder who closes the critical decisions, gets one complete version working end to end, and hands it to your team to own.
What the calculator can and cannot tell you.
The calculator exposes delivery assumptions. It does not validate scope equivalence, quality, security, model behavior, rework, human review, or operating burden. Those have to be pressure-tested before a cost comparison is decision-grade.