Before you spend a dollar on AI, run through this five-point readiness checklist. If you can’t answer four out of five, you’re not ready yet.
Everyone wants “AI” until it’s time to deploy it. The gap between excitement and execution is where most companies stall — not because AI is hard, but because they skip the readiness check. Here’s the checklist we run every client through before building anything.
1. Do you have a clear, measurable problem?
“We want to use AI” is not a problem. “We spend 12 hours a week answering the same support questions” is. If you can’t state the problem in one sentence with a number attached, you’re not ready.
2. Is your data accessible?
AI needs data — and most companies’ data is scattered across five tools, three spreadsheets, and someone’s inbox. Before deploying AI, you need at least one consolidated source of truth for the problem you’re solving.
This doesn’t mean a massive data warehouse. It means: can the AI see the information it needs to do its job?
3. Do you have a human in the loop?
The best AI deployments keep a human in the loop — not for every action, but for the edge cases. If your plan is “deploy AI and walk away,” you’ll be disappointed. If your plan is “deploy AI and review the exceptions weekly,” you’ll win.
4. What’s the rollback plan?
If the AI makes a mistake, what happens? You need a clear fallback: the AI handles X, a human reviews Y, and Z goes straight to manual. Without this, a single bad output erodes trust permanently.
5. Is there executive buy-in for iteration?
AI gets better with iteration. The first version won’t be perfect — and that’s expected. If leadership expects 100% accuracy on day one, the project will be killed before it has a chance to learn. You need buy-in for a 90-day iteration cycle, not a one-shot deployment.
The score
If you can answer “yes” to four out of five, you’re ready. If not, that’s fine — but fix the gaps before spending on AI. A company with clean data and a clear problem will outperform a company with a big budget and fuzzy goals every time.
Run through this checklist honestly. Then book a strategy call — we’ll help you validate your answers and map the first deployment.