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ReadyCIO · The Ready Test

Is your business ready for AI? Be honest.

Ten questions an owner can answer without asking anyone. Three minutes. Your answers stay in your browser, and the result tells you which of four steps your business is on and the one thing to do next. If you are a fractional executive, send this to your client before the next meeting.

The Ready Test

Ten questions. Three minutes. No wrong answers, only honest ones.

Answer for your business as it is today, not as you would like it to be. "Not sure" counts as no; it is the most useful answer here. You can download your answers as a PDF at the end. The ten yes/no answers are kept anonymously, with no name, email or address, so I can see which questions businesses find hardest.

  1. 01Could you name the three jobs in your business where AI or better software would save the most time, in hours a week?
  2. 02Is one named person responsible for what the company does about AI?
  3. 03Do you know which AI tools your staff already use, including the free ones on their phones?
  4. 04Is there a written rule, one page or less, on which tools staff may use and what must never be pasted in?
  5. 05Has everyone been walked through that rule in person, using your own documents, not by email?
  6. 06In the last year, has a process in the business actually changed because of AI, rather than people just chatting with it?
  7. 07If someone on staff built a tool or spreadsheet the business now relies on, has a second person checked it?
  8. 08Does everything the business relies on run under a company account, not somebody's personal login?
  9. 09If a tool produced a wrong figure for a month, would you find out before a customer did?
  10. 10If the person who set it all up left on Friday, could someone else keep it running on Monday?

What the test measures

Ready is not a technology. It is five things a business can say out loud.

No jargon in any of them. If you can say all five without hesitating, you are ahead of nearly every company your size. The five signs, and the twelve-question longer test →

  1. 1

    You can say where AI would save you time, in hours, not vibes.

    Three workflows, ranked, with a rough figure beside each. "It will transform the business" is not a figure.

  2. 2

    Someone is in charge of it, by name.

    Not a department, not "we all keep an eye on it". One person the rest of the company asks.

  3. 3

    Staff know what they may paste into a chatbot and what they never may.

    One page, briefed in person. Without it, every employee has a policy of their own and the company has none.

  4. 4

    Anything you rely on was checked by a second person.

    The spreadsheet, the tool someone built on a weekend, the AI-written quote. Checked against what the business asked for, not what the builder thought.

  5. 5

    If it quietly went wrong, you would find out before a customer did.

    A wrong figure for a month is the usual bad week. Something has to be watching while nobody is looking.