The AI Readiness Assessment Framework

Readiness is not about technical sophistication. Businesses with modest technology stacks frequently outperform better-resourced competitors because their processes are documented and their data is trustworthy.

Assess four dimensions honestly: data, process, people and governance. A weakness in any one of them will cap the return on everything else.

You do not need a data lake. You need to know, for each commercially important process, where the record of truth lives and how reliable it is.

Automation encodes a process. If the process is undocumented or varies by individual, automation will encode the variation and amplify it.

The single strongest predictor of programme success is whether an operational leader, not a technologist, owns the outcome. Enthusiasm in IT is not sufficient.

Decide before launch what the system is permitted to do without a human, what it must escalate, and who reviews the log. Retrofitting governance after an incident is expensive and slow.

Score each dimension one to five. Any dimension below three should be addressed before deployment in that area, not in parallel with it. A business scoring three or above across all four is ready to begin, regardless of size or sector.