AI Readiness Questionnaire

Goal: Determine if your organisation has the data maturity, culture, and operational need to successfully adopt AI.

Operational Impact

1. What are the key operational bottlenecks or manual processes costing your team the most time today?

2. Which department do you foresee benefiting most from AI (e.g., HR, Legal, Customer Support, Data Analysis)?

3. Does your executive team have a defined budget and timeline for digital transformation or AI integration this year?

Knowledge Foundation

4. Where does your organisation's core knowledge currently live? (e.g., Spreadsheets, SharePoint, Google Drive, proprietary ERP/CRM, physical paper), Not sure

5. How structured and digitised is your current data? (Rate 1-5: 1 = highly unstructured/scattered, 5 = centralised and perfectly formatted databases).

6. Are there strict access controls currently in place for your internal documents? (i.e., does the system know who is allowed to see what?)

Security & Compliance Standards

7. What is the sensitivity level of the data you handle? (Public, Internal Only, Confidential, Highly Sensitive/Regulated, not sure)

8. Do you have strict data localisation requirements preventing you from sending company data to public cloud providers (like OpenAI or Copilot)?

9. Are you subject to specific regional data protection regulations that require full audit trails of information access?

10. Are your employees currently using public AI tools (like ChatGPT) for work tasks?

Digital Readiness & Adoption

11. Does your IT team currently manage on-premise infrastructure, or are you entirely reliant on external cloud services?

12. How receptive is your staff to adopting new, complex software workflows?

Scale: 5 = totally on board with new software, 1 = totally against new technology.

Goal: This section is to determine if your organisation has the right data and mindset, and to define the exact Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or to understand your aims for deployment.

Primary Objectives

1. Describe the ideal first task you want the AI to handle. (e.g., Filter CVs, streamline writing proposals, organise my calendar)

2. Will you be wanting AI to generate content (emails, reports, code) or extracting/analysing information (reading PDFs, summarising meeting notes)?

3. What is the definition of success for this initial deployment?

Team Integration

4. How should your team interact with the AI?

5. How many total employees will need access to this system?

6. Do you require different AI "Agents" for different departments (e.g., an HR Agent, a Legal Agent, a Financial Agent)?

Goal: The aim is to understand your requirements for hardware (CPU, RAM, VRAM/GPU), your custom requirements, possible RAG pipelines, and security integration.

Performance Requirements

1. Concurrency: What is the maximum number of users likely to query the AI at the exact same time during peak hours?

2. Latency: What is the acceptable response time for a complex query?

3. Physical Infrastructure: Do you have existing, climate-controlled server rack space with adequate power distribution, or do you require a self-contained edge server delivered to your office?

4. Power & Cooling: Can your current facility handle high-draw GPU compute nodes, or do we need to specify advanced thermal management solutions?

5. Do you have a preferred hardware supplier?

Knowledge Base Architecture

6. Volume: What is the estimated total size of the documents/data the AI needs to "read" and understand?

7. Format: What formats make up this data?

8. Ingestion Frequency: How often does this internal knowledge base change and need to be re-indexed?

Network & Security Topology

9. Topology: Will this server sit entirely offline (air-gapped), strictly on a local intranet, or accessible remotely via a secure VPN/Tailnet?

10. Existing Security Stack: Do you require integration with existing enterprise security monitoring (e.g., Wazuh, CrowdSec, Active Directory/LDAP)?

11. Firewalling: Who will be responsible for the network-level firewall routing to the new appliance, your internal IT or our deployment team?

Bespoke Development Scope

12. Do you require a fully custom-branded web interface, or is a standard, secure chat interface sufficient?

13. Are there specific, proprietary software APIs the AI needs to connect to (e.g., triggering an action in a bespoke CRM)?

14. Do you need custom "ModelFiles" or system prompts explicitly trained to emulate your company's tone of voice and internal jargon?