The Star AI Readiness Index scores six dimensions that, in our experience consulting 30–300-person businesses, predict whether an AI initiative will land or stall: people (whether anyone owns AI day-to-day), process (what real work could be automated or accelerated today), data(what’s actually usable and what’s on a shared drive), tooling (the Microsoft, Google or hybrid stack already paid for), governance (the policy, access and audit posture), and ROI capacity (whether the business has the budget and bandwidth to act on a recommendation).
Each dimension scores 0–100. The weighted blend is your overall readiness score and places your organisation in one of four tiers — Foundational, Emerging, Established or Advanced — with a tailored recommendation set per tier. The same engine then ranks AI opportunities (Copilot rollouts, document-intelligence pipelines, knowledge agents, forecasting) by feasibility × expected ROI, and produces an outline 18-month implementation roadmap aligned to whichever stack you already own. Nothing is invented — the recommendation set draws from case studies of comparable engagements and from the public research base we maintain in our SMB AI Adoption 2026 report.
The output is a written PDF. We do not gate it — you get the report in your inbox whether you book a call with us or not. If you want a second opinion on the numbers before you take it to your CFO, our ROI Lab lets you re-run the financial model with your own inputs.