Three hours to your first AI workflow

The honest case for AI at your size, the five-level ladder, the fifteen-minute measurement, the Decision Engine, and the ninety-day sequence.

1. 01 Why AI matters for a business your size The case for AI in an SME: what the numbers say, where the advantage is, and why waiting is the expensive option. 15 min
2. 02 Five levels, one target The AIRI maturity ladder from AI Unaware to AI Catalyst, and why AI Ready, not the top rung, is the destination for almost every SME. 15 min
3. 03 Measure before you spend How the free AIRI assessment works, with two instruments of fifteen minutes each, and why the gap between your people and your organisation is itself a finding. 15 min
4. 04 What is AIRI The AI Readiness Index measures readiness on five pillars, from leadership and culture to infrastructure and standards. What each pillar asks, and why only two of the five are technical. 15 min
5. 05 The AIRI Decision Engine How to score a candidate AI project before spending money: the DE formula, why people count double, why data outweighs infrastructure, and why ethics is a gate, not a score. 12 min
6. 06 Your first ninety days The four steps that take an SME from a readiness score to a running workflow in ninety days: AI literacy for all staff, scoping and agreement on what is done, a mentored build, and deploy with re-assessment. 15 min

Prediction from patterns, the five things AI does in a business, the generative and agent layer, and the failure catalogue.

1. 07 What AI actually is AI stripped of the movies and the marketing: prediction from patterns, learned from examples, with nothing inside it that knows or wants. 15 min
2. 08 The five things AI does Classification, clustering, forecasting, computer vision, and generation: the complete list, each with a real SME use case. 15 min
3. 09 Generative AI and agents How large language models work, what changed when they arrived, and the three skills that define working with them: delegation, specification, and trust calibration. 15 min
4. 10 Where AI fails The honest failure catalogue, from hallucination and drift to data debt and the pilot-to-production gap, and the rules that keep each of them from becoming your problem. 15 min

Pick one real bottleneck, choose the build pathway, vet providers with eight questions, and measure so it sticks.

1. 11 The starter kit, step by step The use-case selection method: each AIRI pillar is one filter a candidate project must pass, and the Decision Engine ranks what survives. The three effort bands explained. 15 min
2. 12 Build, buy, or grow your own The three engagement pathways for an SME, subscribe and configure, grow your own people through mentored training, or bring in a collaborator for the complex project, and how to choose between them. 15 min
3. 13 Choosing a solution provider Eight questions to ask an AI provider in your first meeting: the answers tell you who can deliver into production and who can only demonstrate. 15 min
4. 14 Making it stick The measurement rhythm that keeps AI adoption alive after the first project: three metrics, a six-month cadence, and the destination restated. 15 min