A 20-minute AI readiness checklist you can run today

You do not need a consultancy engagement to get a first read on AI readiness. You need twenty focused minutes and a willingness to answer honestly.

Data

• Can you export your customer, job or sales data without asking a supplier for help?
• Is there one agreed source of truth, or several competing spreadsheets?
• Do you know what personal data you hold and where it is stored?

Failure signal: the answer to any of these starts with "it depends who you ask". Ambiguous data ownership is the single most common reason AI pilots stall.

Process

• Is your highest-volume workflow written down anywhere?
• Could a new starter follow it without shadowing someone for a fortnight?
• Do you measure how long it currently takes?

Failure signal: no baseline measurement. Without a before, you cannot prove an after, and the project quietly loses its budget.

Skills and ownership

• Is one named person accountable for AI decisions?
• Has anyone been given time — not just permission — to experiment?
• Can your team tell a confident wrong answer from a correct one?

Governance

• Do you have an acceptable-use policy staff have actually read?
• Do you know which AI tools are already in use, including the unofficial ones?
• Is there a rule about what data must never be pasted into a public model?

Failure signal: shadow AI. If you cannot list the tools in use, you are already carrying risk you have not assessed.

Turning the checklist into a score

Mark each item as In place, Partial or Not started. Any dimension with more than one Not started is a gap to close before you scale. A structured assessment does the same thing with thirty questions and gives you a benchmark against similar businesses.