Most AI readiness assessments are written for large companies: data lakes, cloud maturity, an AI center of excellence. A small business needs to answer simpler questions: which process, which data, who checks the result, and what happens when it goes wrong. These 25 questions are the ones we ask in our discovery workshops before we quote an AI agent.
How to use this assessment
- Pick one process you would like to automate, such as order entry, lead follow-up or monthly reporting. Answer for that process, not for the whole company.
- For each question, choose Yes (2 points), Partly (1 point) or No (0 points).
- Read your score out of 50 and the recommendation for your band.
Nothing you enter is sent or stored; the score is computed in your browser.
What your score means
| Score | Stage | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| 0–14 | Exploring | Start with a business AI plan for the team and written rules for its use. Document the process before automating it. |
| 15–29 | Preparing | Fix the gaps in data access and ownership first. A short discovery workshop will tell you which process to start with. |
| 30–39 | Ready to pilot | Pick one process and run a pilot with a human checkpoint on every output for the first weeks. |
| 40–50 | Ready to scale | You can automate with confidence; plan monitoring and maintenance as seriously as the build. |
Whatever the score, a "No" in section 5 is the one to fix before launch.
What are the five stages of AI readiness?
Frameworks differ, but a widely cited five-stage model (Gartner's AI maturity model) runs from awareness, to active experimentation, to operational use, to systemic use across the business, to transformational. For a small business, the practical stages are simpler: exploring, preparing, piloting one process, running it in production, and scaling to other processes.
How long does an AI readiness assessment take?
This self-assessment takes about ten minutes for one process. Our discovery workshop, which turns the answers into a scope and a quote, usually takes one session, and it is recorded and transcribed so the specification starts from what was actually said.
Turn your score into a plan
If you scored 15 or more, the next step is a short call to pick the first process and estimate it. The cost structure of an agent (build, run, maintain) is explained in our AI agent cost guide, and the way we run a discovery is on AI automation consultant.