AI Readiness Assessment

Because a free assessment is a sales document, and both sides know it. If the assessment is free, it is being funded by the implementation that follows, which means it has one permissible conclusion: you should buy the implementation. A paid audit has no such obligation. We are equally happy to conclude that your best move is an off-the-shelf product, a process fix, or nothing this year — and we have delivered all three of those conclusions. At around $3,000 the audit is priced to be a rounding error against the cost of a wrong build, which routinely runs into six figures once you count internal time.

Businesses with roughly 20 or more staff where someone senior has been asked "what are we doing about AI?" and does not want to answer with a vendor pitch. The 20-staff threshold is not arbitrary: below it, the answer is usually a handful of off-the-shelf tools and better process, and we will tell you that in a free consultation without charging you $3,000 to hear it. Above it, you generally have enough process volume, enough systems and enough people that the sequencing question becomes genuinely hard — and getting it wrong becomes genuinely expensive.

Data (do you have the inputs, at the quality required, for the use cases you want), Systems (can we integrate with your systems of record, and do they have usable interfaces), Process (are the target processes stable and well-defined enough to automate, or would you be automating chaos), People (who will own this, and does anyone have capacity), Governance (privacy, risk, and what your obligations actually are under the Privacy Act 1988), and Economics (does the volume of work justify the build cost at all). Each is scored with evidence and a specific remediation where the score is low. The scores are not the deliverable — the reasoning behind them is.

A written report of roughly 20 to 30 pages: readiness scored across the six dimensions with the evidence behind each score; a ranked register of the AI opportunities we found in your business, with value and feasibility ratings; an explicit list of the opportunities we rejected and why, which clients often find the most useful section; one recommended first build with a cost estimate and a rough payback range; and a set of prerequisites you need to handle regardless of what you build. We also present it and answer questions live. The report is written to be read by your executive team, not by us.

About three weeks end to end. From your side, expect around six to eight hours in total across the business: an hour with the managing director, forty-five minutes each with three or four function heads, an hour or two with whoever administers your core systems, and short conversations with a few frontline staff. We do not need a project team, a steering committee or a data room. If an assessment requires you to assemble a working group, the assessment is the problem.

Then you have paid $3,000 to avoid a much larger mistake, and the report tells you specifically what to fix and in what order. "Not ready" is almost never a verdict on the business — it is usually one or two concrete blockers, like a system of record with no API, or a process that changes so often it cannot be automated yet. Those are fixable, they are cheaper to fix than to work around, and knowing about them before you commission a build is worth considerably more than the audit costs. Roughly speaking, a "wait and fix these two things first" outcome is one of the most common results.

No, and the report is deliberately written so it does not have to. It names products where buying beats building, it specifies requirements clearly enough that another firm could quote against them, and it does not hide the working. Some clients take the audit in-house and build it themselves; some take it to a vendor; some ask us to build the first initiative. All three are fine outcomes. An audit that only works if we do the build is not an audit.