Insights ·
What an AI readiness assessment should give you
In June 2025 Gartner forecast that more than 40% of agentic AI projects would be cancelled by the end of 2027, and gave three reasons: escalating costs, unclear business value and inadequate risk controls. Every one of those can be seen before a line of code is written, if someone looks.
That is the job of a readiness assessment. Done well, it is the cheapest part of an AI project and the part that saves the most money. Done badly, it is a questionnaire with a maturity score at the end.
What it should cover
- The work itself. Someone should watch how the task is done today, where it stalls and what a mistake costs. Interviews with managers are not enough.
- The data you really have: where it lives, how current it is, who is allowed to see it and what is missing.
- The options, including the ones without AI. A rule, a query or a better form often solves the problem for less.
- The full cost: data preparation, integration, evaluation, operation and the time people will spend reviewing output.
- Risk and regulation: what the system could do wrong, who answers for it, and how the use is classified under the EU AI Act and data protection law.
- A first release small enough to judge, with the tests it must pass and a named owner.
What you should receive
A written document you could hand to another supplier. It should say, for each opportunity, whether to go ahead, change the approach or stop, and why. It should give cost assumptions you can challenge, measures of success with a baseline, and a scope for the first release.
“Stop” has to be a possible answer. The Stanford AI Index 2026 reports that AI agents still fail roughly one in three attempts on structured benchmarks. Some tasks cannot tolerate that rate, and an assessment that never says so is not assessing anything.
How to recognise a sales exercise
- The outcome is a score or a maturity level, with no decision attached.
- Every recommendation involves the same product or platform.
- Nobody asked to see the data or the systems.
- There are no costs, or only licence costs.
- The findings cannot be used without the firm that wrote them.
How we do it
An assessment is one of the two ways a first phase with us can start, at a fixed price agreed in writing. You receive the findings in writing and they are yours. Whether you build with us afterwards is a separate decision.
Before that there is a free 30-minute call, which is often enough to tell whether an assessment is worth doing at all.