What an AI Readiness Assessment Actually Looks Like.
Your CEO said “figure out AI.” You have budget and a mandate with no instructions. Here’s what the assessment that actually answers that question looks like — and what it costs.
Your CEO said “figure out AI.” You have $200K in budget and a mandate with no instructions. You Googled “AI readiness assessment” and found two things: Deloitte ($800K, six months, a slide deck the size of a phonebook) and a dozen SaaS vendors who want to sell you a platform dressed up as a strategy.
Neither of those is what you need.
Here’s what an actual assessment looks like — the kind that gives you a prioritized list of what to automate, what it’ll cost, and whether it’s worth doing at all.
Start With Workflows, Not Technology
The first mistake almost every company makes: they start with the tool. “Let’s get ChatGPT Enterprise.” “Should we build a copilot?” “What about that thing Salesforce announced?”
Wrong question. The right question is: where is your team spending time on work that doesn’t require their expertise?
An AI readiness assessment starts by mapping workflows. Not all of them — the ones where skilled people are doing unskilled work. Data entry. Report generation. Formatting. Triage. The tasks that eat hours but don’t use judgment.
You’d be surprised how many organizations can’t answer this question cleanly. They know it’s happening. They can’t tell you where, or how many hours, or what it costs. The assessment produces that map.
Find the 3–5 Opportunities That Actually Matter
Once you have the workflow map, most of it is noise. Maybe 40 processes touch your team’s week. Maybe 8 of those involve repetitive work. Maybe 3–5 of those have the right combination: high time cost, low complexity, data already in a system somewhere.
Those are your candidates.
A real example: one client had 14 analyst-hours per week going into reporting. Pulling data from three systems, formatting it, writing summaries, emailing it out. After scoping an automation pipeline, that dropped to 3 hours. The 11 hours recovered went back into actual analysis — the thing they hired analysts to do.
The assessment didn’t just identify “reporting is slow.” It identified which reports, which data sources, which handoffs were causing the bleed. And it scoped the fix precisely enough to estimate cost and timeline before a single line of code was written.
Assess Whether Your Data Can Support It
This is where most AI initiatives quietly die. The workflow is right. The opportunity is real. But the data is trapped in PDFs, or scattered across three systems that don’t talk to each other, or maintained by one person who keeps it in a spreadsheet named “master_v3_FINAL_USE_THIS.xlsx.”
For each of the 3–5 opportunities, the assessment answers: Can your existing systems feed an AI workflow? What’s structured? What’s not? What’s missing? What would it take to close the gap?
Sometimes the answer is “your CRM already has what we need, we just need an API connection.” Sometimes it’s “you’d need to digitize six months of intake forms before this becomes viable.” Both answers are useful. One means you can move fast. The other means you know the real cost before you commit.
A Roadmap With Numbers, Not Adjectives
The deliverable isn’t a strategy deck full of quadrants and maturity curves. It’s a prioritized list:
Opportunity 1: what it is, what it costs to build, estimated hours recovered per week, projected ROI over 12 months. Opportunity 2: same. Down the list.
Each one gets a go/no-go recommendation. Some won’t be worth it — the setup cost exceeds the return, or the data gap is too expensive to close. The assessment tells you that before you spend money finding out.
And if the answer is “you can do this internally” — hire a contractor, use an off-the-shelf tool, have your existing team handle it — the assessment says so. It’s a standalone deliverable. Not the first slide in a sales pitch for a bigger engagement.
Who This Is For
This is built for companies between 100 and 500 people. Big enough that inefficiency has real cost. Small enough that a $800K consulting engagement is absurd.
The assessment costs $7,500 and takes 2–3 weeks. You get workflow mapping, opportunity identification, data readiness evaluation, and a prioritized roadmap with ROI estimates. Everything scoped to your actual operations, not a generic framework with your logo pasted on it.
If you’re the person who got told to “figure out AI” — this is the figuring out part. It tells you what’s worth doing, what it’ll take, and whether to do it at all.
Book an AI Readiness Assessment.
$7,500. Two to three weeks. A prioritized roadmap with ROI estimates — not a slide deck. If your team can handle it internally, I’ll tell you that too.
Book a 30-Minute Call