Your Company Isn’t Ready for AI.

Executives and board members everywhere are asking a reasonable question:

“Are we ready for AI?”

I think it’s the wrong question.

Very few organizations are uniformly “ready” or “not ready” for AI. A company might have excellent data in one department and spreadsheets held together by institutional knowledge in another. One team may have mature, repeatable processes while another succeeds largely because three experienced people know how to work around the system.

So instead, ask:

“Are we ready to use AI for this?”

That small change makes the difference. More importantly, it gives you what you need to take action.

And, as you’ll note in most of my strategy posts, we start with inventory.

There are lots of great questions to answer in strategy: What problem are we trying to solve? How does the process operate today? Who performs it? What information do they need? Where are the delays, errors, judgment calls, exceptions, and handoffs?

Most of this is inventory and status. And frankly, it can be tedious. It is so much more fun and exciting to dig in. Try new tools! Discover what is possible.

And all of that should be done. This doesn’t have to be painful and dull.

But we need to do some homework if we want good results. Simple questions, and even partial responses, can make a big difference in the outcomes. In fact, they can make ALL the difference.

• Do we have the data required?
• Is it accessible and reliable?
• Do the people involved understand the process well enough to change it?
• Are there privacy, regulatory, security, or operational risks?
• Can our existing technology support the proposed solution?
• What happens if an AI system produces the wrong answer?

These questions often expose something important:

The biggest obstacle to an AI project may have nothing to do with AI.

A poorly understood process doesn’t become better because you add a language model. Bad data doesn’t become trustworthy because an AI can read it. An organization that hasn’t decided who owns a decision doesn’t solve that problem by automating part of the workflow.

In fact, AI can amplify those weaknesses.

That’s why I prefer to assess readiness around a specific business opportunity rather than begin with technology.

Find something worth improving.

Understand how it works today.

Then examine the process, data, people, risk, security, technology, and vendors required to make that particular opportunity successful.

The result isn’t simply an “AI readiness score.”

It’s a gap analysis.

Some gaps may kill the idea. Others might require a few weeks of preparation. And sometimes the assessment shows that a small, controlled pilot is entirely reasonable.

That’s a much more useful answer than “We’re 73% ready for AI.”

I cover this approach in my Maven course, Assess Your Firm’s AI Readiness.

The objective isn’t to convince you that your organization needs more AI.

It’s to help you determine where AI makes business sense, what could derail it, and what needs to happen before you spend serious money finding out the hard way.