AI readiness

This chapter introduces the concept of AI readiness – an organization's ability to effectively deploy AI to create value – and provides a structured framework for its assessment and improvement. AI readiness is defined across four interdependent dimensions: technologies, activities, boundaries, and goals. Drawing on empirical workshops, the chapter illustrates how organizations can evaluate their current and future AI capabilities, identify bottlenecks, and design strategies to enhance readiness. It emphasizes that AI readiness goes beyond technology to encompass strategy, culture, governance, and ethics. Key steps to improve readiness include developing clear AI strategies, investing in data and infrastructure, building cross-functional teams, ensuring ethical governance, and fostering a learning culture. The framework serves as both a diagnostic and developmental tool, enabling organizations to align technological innovation with strategic goals, thereby laying the foundation for responsible and effective AI transformation. Where do you get started on AI transformation if you are an established organization? Many books on digital innovation and digital strategy focus heavily on start-ups. But the challenges of launching a blank-slate, digital first business are quite different from those of adapting an established organization that already has infrastructure, sales channels, employees, and an organizational culture to contend with. In my own experience – advising executives at centuries-old multinational organizations as well as brand-new seed-funded start-ups – I have seen that these leaders face very different challenges. The same strategic principles – of customers, competition, data, innovation, and value – apply. But the path to implementing these principles is different, depending on the point from which one starts. In this chapter, we will elaborate on what AI readiness is, how it can be measured, and how an organization can improve its AI readiness.