The AI Readiness self-assessment
You think you are further along on AI than you are.
Most people do. And so far, more AI has been making delivery less reliable, not more.
For every 25% increase in AI adoption, delivery stability drops 7.2%.DORA · 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps Report
Twenty questions about the system you actually run: the repositories, the pipeline, the tests, the branches. One at a time, about thirty minutes, and it will not flatter you.
The questions are not live yet. The ladder and the scoring rules are, deliberately.
Why assessment is important.
You are already making readiness decisions. Approving a tool, widening a pilot, telling a board that agents will lift delivery next year: each one asserts that your system can absorb them. None of them measures it.
Unmeasured is not the same as wrong. It is the same as unarguable, and the confident version wins by default. The error also has a direction. You know your best-run services best, because those are the ones that get demonstrated, and in engagements the thing capping a system is almost never the thing I am shown first. An agent finds it first.
Thirty minutes buys a number, the single thing holding it there, and a published ladder that anyone who disagrees has to argue with instead. Better than you feared, and you spent half an hour. Worse, and you found out before you scaled.
The floor is the score.
The assessment breaks your system into 20 separate dimensions and scores each one from 1 to 5. Repository structure. CI reliability. Test meaningfulness. How old your oldest branch is. Seventeen more.
Your floor is the lowest of those 20 scores, and your floor is your readiness. Not the average, not a weighted composite, not a percentage of a maximum.
You already rate systems this way. A chain, a pipeline, a load path: the weakest part sets the rating and nobody averages the rest. Readiness is the same shape.
Which is why most floors are low, and that is arithmetic rather than an accusation. One weak dimension out of 20 caps the result, so organisations that are genuinely good at this routinely land on 2.
One dimension at 1. The average still reads 2.7.
Five levels, and one question decides which.
The same ladder applies to all 20 dimensions. It was not designed. It is what climbing looks like from inside real organisations.
- 5
Durable
Acted on and self-maintaining. It survives acceleration, staff turnover, and next quarter's model upgrade.
- 4
Acted on
The system itself acts, no human choice required. A machine blocks it, a metric gates a decision. It cannot quietly slip.
- 3
Visible but inert
Written down, computable, or diagrammed, but nothing acts on it automatically. The dangerous middle: it feels safe, and an agent goes straight through it.
- 2
Tacit
It happens, but inconsistently, by individual effort. It lives in someone's head; the system does not do it.
- 1
Blind
The capability does not exist. No standard, no metric, no named structure. You are blind here.
Above the line the system acts. Below it, someone has to remember.
That line is the whole ladder. One question decides which side of it you are on: does the system itself act on this, or does a human have to choose to? Levels 1 to 3 need a person to choose. Levels 4 and 5 do not.
The kind of question it asks.
Four of the 20, so you know what you would be answering.
- 01How old is your oldest active branch?
- 02If your pipeline went red right now, would your team investigate, or just rerun it?
- 03Of the dependencies you run in production, how many did a human actually choose?
- 04If AI doubles each team's throughput, do the queues shrink or grow?
There is no clever scoring behind them. You read five descriptions of a real situation and pick the one you recognise. That is slower than clicking a radio button, and it is the only reason the number means anything.
All 20, in 5 clusters, with the article behind each one, are on the method page.
The rules it is being built under.
Thirty honest minutes, and nothing else asked of you. Three of these are checked on every build, and a build that breaks one does not ship. The other two are true because of how the thing is built, which is a weaker guarantee, so they say so.
- No email, no account, no newsletter
- Checked on every build. It searches the rendered pages for an email input, or for a field named email, and fails if it finds either. There is nowhere to put an address, because the markup cannot contain one.
- The PDF will never be locked behind a form
- True by construction rather than by a check. The report is rendered from your own answers, in your own browser. There is no server holding it back and no step between finishing and exporting, so there is nothing to put a form in front of.
- No price, and nothing to buy
- Checked on every build. A euro amount written out anywhere in the rendered site fails it. Nothing is sold here, so a number with a currency sign in front of it is a defect rather than a decision.
- Nothing leaves your browser until you finish
- True by construction rather than by a check. Your answers live in your own browser and never expire. There is no session to lose at minute 24, because there is no session. What is sent when you complete an assessment is itemised in the privacy notice.
- No spreadsheet to download
- Checked on every build. A link to a spreadsheet file fails it. The spreadsheet this replaces is already public elsewhere, and offering it here would concede that this instrument is no better than a spreadsheet.
A rule nothing enforces is a level 3, and a level 3 is the dangerous middle.
Status
The argument is finished. The instrument is not.
And if you already know where you stand, the problem is usually getting someone else to believe you. The report is 20 scores against a ladder published here in advance, so they have to argue with the ladder, not with you.
100 level descriptors make that possible and most of them do not exist yet, so writing them is most of this project. One cluster ships first, as a working mini-assessment, and the format is settled on those four before the rest are written. A site that argues rules should be enforced rather than merely agreed cannot exempt itself from its own rule.
Until then, every dimension it will ask you about is already written up in full: 20 articles, one per dimension. You probably already suspect which one is your weakest. That is the one to read.