Greatex Services / Blog / How Long Does It Take to Build an AI Feature Into My Product?

How Long Does It Take to Build an AI Feature Into My Product?

A simple LLM-powered feature like a chatbot, summarization, or content generation can ship in 2-4 weeks. A custom model trained on your data typically takes 2-4 months including data prep, training, and evaluation.

Simple AI Features (2-4 weeks)

A chatbot using an existing LLM API, content summarization or generation, basic semantic search or RAG over your documents, and sentiment analysis or text classification using pre-trained models. Most of this time is integration and prompt engineering, not model building — you're wiring existing AI capability into your product UX and data.

Moderate Complexity (1-2 months)

A custom RAG pipeline with your proprietary data, properly chunked and indexed; fine-tuning an existing model on your specific use case; or multi-step AI workflows with tool use.

Custom Models (2-4+ months)

Training a model from scratch on proprietary data, or computer vision models for specific detection tasks, which require data collection and labeling, training infrastructure, an evaluation framework, and iteration cycles.

What Actually Determines the Timeline

Data readiness matters more than model complexity. Clean, well-structured data with a clear feature spec ships fast; messy or nonexistent data extends any timeline regardless of the AI approach.

Bottom line: Budget 2-4 weeks for an LLM-API-based feature, 2-4 months for anything requiring custom model training — and add time upfront if your data isn't already clean and accessible.

Need vetted developers who already use AI tools well? Greatex Services places pre-vetted contract engineers across the US, UK, UAE, and ANZ — onboarded in days, not weeks.

Talk to Greatex Services