A practical assessment to understand where your organization stands, what’s holding it back, and where AI could make a meaningful difference.
AI can create meaningful opportunities for businesses, but knowing where to start isn’t always straightforward. This short assessment helps you evaluate your organization’s readiness across several important areas and identify practical next steps.
How scoring works
There are no hidden weightings, and no answer points you toward a particular product or vendor. The same rules apply to everyone.
Each rated answer earns points: Not in place 0, Just getting started 25, Partially in place 50, Mostly in place 75, Well established 100.
Each of the five areas has four questions. An area’s score is the average of its rated answers, from 0 to 100. Your overall score is the average of the five area scores.
They aren’t treated as low readiness. They’re left out of the average and highlighted in your results as things worth finding out. To give a meaningful result, each area needs at least three rated answers, and at least 15 in total. If an area falls short, you’ll be asked to answer a little more rather than given an artificially low score.
| Score | Level | In practice |
|---|---|---|
| 75–100 | Positioned to Scale | Strong foundations across several areas; ready for more systematic adoption. |
| 50–74 | Ready to Accelerate | Meaningful foundations; positioned to test and expand selected uses. |
| 25–49 | Building the Foundation | Some groundwork exists; more structure will help before broader adoption. |
| 0–24 | Exploring | An early stage; start with awareness, priorities, and simple guardrails. |
“Where to Focus” is your lowest-scoring area, plus the next lowest if it’s below 50 or within 10 points. “What’s Working” shows your strongest remaining areas. Next steps come from the specific questions you rated lowest, so two people with the same score can get different advice.
The optional challenge question isn’t part of your score. It’s used only to suggest areas to explore, each checked against the readiness areas it depends on. These are possibilities to investigate, not promises of a return.
Privacy and limits: Your answers are scored in your browser and are never sent to a server, analytics provider, or AI service. They’re kept in this browser tab’s session storage only so you can look up terms and return to your results; they disappear when you close the tab, or you can clear them at any time. This is an indicative self-assessment, not a scientifically validated ranking, a certification, or a technical, security, or legal review.
Perspective
The pattern in smaller companies is consistent: the technology works well enough, and the pilot stalls anyway. The data is scattered, the process varies by person, nobody owns the result, or there’s no baseline to show it helped.
That’s why most of this assessment is about the business, not the technology. They’re the same disciplines that make any operating improvement stick.
Before evaluating any tool, write down one process that costs the business real time or money, measure it for a few weeks, and decide what improvement would justify the investment.
Then run a 60- to 90-day pilot with one business owner, clear ground rules on data, and a decision meeting already on the calendar: scale, change, or stop.
New to some of the terms? Read AI Explained, the plain-English guide
Next step
These resources are designed to help you identify opportunities and move your business forward. If you’d benefit from an experienced operator’s perspective, I’m happy to compare notes.