Most small businesses start their AI project with a purchase. Someone reads about a chatbot, buys five licenses, and three months later nobody can say whether it saved an hour. The tool is rarely the problem. Nothing was measured before it arrived, so nothing could be judged after.

A readiness assessment puts those steps in the right order. It asks what your business already has, where the repetition sits, and who would own a rollout, before any money moves. Ours is ten questions and takes about three minutes. Here is what it looks at and what comes back.

What readiness actually means

Readiness is not enthusiasm and it is not technical skill. It is whether AI tools have something to plug into. These tools read your documents, answer your repeat questions, and sit inside software you already pay for. A company with organized cloud storage, a steady flow of similar emails, and one person willing to own the project usually sees results in weeks. A company with paper files, one-off work, and nobody with spare time will pay for licenses and see nothing.

Before you price a single tool, decide whether the raw material exists.

The four questions about your work

How your team uses AI today. Whether you could name your top three time sinks right now. How much repeat communication you handle. Whether your common procedures are written down anywhere.

Those four carry most of the weight. Time sinks are your shopping list. Repetition is what makes a $30 per user subscription pay for itself, because a tool that handles the same question forty times a week earns its cost and a tool that handles a different question every time does not. Written procedures are what an assistant reads in order to answer instead of guess.

If you cannot name your top three time sinks, track them for two weeks before you buy anything.

The three questions about your systems

Where your documents live. Whether your core software is cloud or desktop. Whether anyone has pasted work information into a free chatbot.

Document storage decides more than people expect. Every tool worth having feeds on your files, and none of them can read a filing cabinet or a folder on one person's laptop. Desktop software from a decade ago has no integration to connect to, so the work of moving data becomes manual and the savings disappear. The chatbot question is about exposure: free accounts often use conversations to improve future models unless someone turns that off, and most staff have never looked at the setting.

Open your storage and ask whether a new hire could find last year's contracts by searching. If not, fix that first.

The three questions about people and money

Who would own the rollout. What you would spend per month. What happened the last time you rolled out new software.

The ownership question predicts failure better than anything technical. Tools without a named owner go quiet in month two, and the technology gets the blame. The budget question is there because useful tools for a 5 to 100 person business generally run somewhere between $20 and $60 per user per month, and a company unwilling to spend anything is better served by process changes that cost nothing. The history question matters because a business that has already watched one rollout fizzle will watch the next one fizzle the same way unless training time goes into the plan.

Name one owner on paper before you shortlist tools.

What the score means

Each answer is worth 0, 1, or 2 points, for a maximum of 20. Under 8 means the foundations are not there yet, and buying tools now would waste money. Most of what is missing at that level is free to fix and worth fixing anyway. Between 8 and 14 means the basics would work at your company today, and the real risk is buying the wrong things or starting with no owner. Fifteen and above means the simple tools would land, and the opportunity is depth: connecting AI to your own documents, automating whole workflows rather than single tasks, and keeping the policy side current.

Take the check at the readiness page and write your score down.

What you get

The result appears on screen straight away, with no email address required. You see your band, an explanation of what it means for a business your size, and up to three specific fixes drawn from the questions where you scored zero. Those fixes are concrete: track your hours for two weeks, get documents into searchable cloud storage, write a one page AI usage policy, name an owner.

If you want more, there is an optional form for a written plan specific to your answers: what to do first, which tools fit, and what they cost. A person writes it, so it can take a day.

Do the three minutes before you do the three months.

If you would rather talk it through, the first call is free and takes about 30 minutes. We go through your answers, look at what you already pay for, and agree on one thing to start with that you can judge on real numbers. Get in touch and pick a time.