Why this assessment makes sense

Everyone is "doing AI". Most are spending money on tools they cannot operate yet. This 8-question diagnostic focuses on what actually matters before adopting AI in a real company: do you have the data, the processes, the team and the strategy for AI to deliver value.

If your company has been deploying copilots everywhere for 18 months with little productivity to show, the problem is almost never the tool. It is one of the four vectors below.

The 4 areas it evaluates

• Data. Whether your customer, product, order and operations data is clean and available enough for AI to learn from it.
• Processes. Whether you have defined workflows AI can plug into without creating chaos. T42 rule: automate the basics before layering AI on top.
• Team. Whether your people know how to use AI, when not to, and have the capacity to integrate it into their work. Without AI literacy, tools are useless.
• Strategy. Whether you have a clear reason to use AI, or it is just FOMO dressed up as an initiative.

The 5 maturity levels

Your final score (0 to 5) places you in one of five levels. Each has its own playbook:

• Not Ready. Minimum conditions are not in place. AI is a distraction. First, data and processes.
• Exploring. One-off experiments, no strategy. Turn experiments into documented learnings.
• Piloting. A few use cases producing value. Time to measure impact and replicate what works.
• Scaling. AI integrated into key workflows. The risk is dispersion: focus and consolidate.
• Leading. Real competitive advantage. Keep the pace and watch the technical debt of your models.

Who this is for

Heads of ecommerce, B2B teams, founders and CMOs considering AI who want an honest starting point. Not for Fortune 500 corporate AI strategy: McKinsey is there for that.

Common questions