Business owners · Free guide
Is your business AI-ready?
Get a score out of 10, and the one task to start with.
What you will get: You get a score out of 10, the gaps to close, the one task to start with, and a rough payback figure in your currency.
The key points
- Being AI-ready doesn't mean buying anything. It means four things are in place: you know where your time goes, your information is in order, you have simple safety rules, and one person owns it.
- The 10 checks cover Time (your repeat tasks and their hours), Tools and data (where information lives, who can see which files, which plan you're on), Safety (a rule for pasting into AI, where customer data lives, a person approves what AI sends) and Ownership (one owner and one number to measure).
- Your score points to a next step. 8 to 10: you're ready to build. 4 to 7: close a few gaps, then pick your first task. 0 to 3: start with the basics in our free guide "AI in plain English".
- AI assistants such as Microsoft Copilot can surface any file a person can already open. Check who can open your HR, payroll and finance folders before you switch them on.
- Choose your first task by scoring how often it happens, the hours it takes, how repeatable it is, whether the information is digital, and how much harm a wrong draft could do. A task that touches money, health, legal or safety decisions is never the first one.
- The payback sum works in any currency: hours a week x cost per hour x 48 working weeks, times a cautious guess at the share AI could take. Then compare that with the set-up and running costs.
- Start with drafts, not decisions. AI can be confidently wrong, so a person should check anything before it reaches a customer.
Inside the guide
- How to use this guide
- The 10-point AI-ready check
- Why each check matters, and a quick fix
- What your score means, with a worked example
- The first task to automate picker
- The one-page payback sum
- Your next step, and sources
Who it is for
- Owners of small firms with 1 to 50 staff
- Managers asked to find a first AI win
- Anyone who wants to check before they spend
Sources
- Eurostat, Use of artificial intelligence in enterprises (data extracted December 2025)
- Microsoft Learn, Data, Privacy, and Security for Microsoft Copilot
- National Cyber Security Centre (UK), ChatGPT and large language models: what's the risk?
- European Commission, Principles of the GDPR (an example of data protection rules)
More free guides
AI in plain English: what it is, and what it gets wrongYou can explain AI to a colleague in two minutes, and catch hype and mistakes before they reach a customer.
Copilot without the oversharing: the 10-point SharePoint checkYou get a list of risky SharePoint sites, who fixes each one and by when, and a signed sign-off from each site owner.