Five levels, one target

Quick win this week. Ask each manager which one recurring task they would happily hand to a good intern. That list is your Level 2 candidate list.

Most frameworks flatter you by implying you should climb as high as possible. The AI Readiness Index (AIRI, the framework I built and have used with more than five thousand organisations) does the opposite. It is explicit about where you should stop, and for a small or medium business that stopping point is the whole strategy.

The ladder has five levels.

Level 0, AI Unaware. The organisation does not know what AI can do, has no identified use cases, and waits for vendors to call. There is no shame here; it is where most of the economy sat three years ago.

Level 1, AI Aware. People have tried chatbots. Someone attended a workshop. Use cases get discussed but nothing is woven into how the business runs. Awareness without practice.

Level 2, AI Ready. Simple department-level AI workflows run inside the business, often built by your own domain experts using AI tools. Quotation drafting from your own templates. Enquiry triage. Stock alerts built on your own sales data. The work runs through the process, not around it.

Level 3, AI Competent. AI solutions run in production and an in-house team builds and maintains them. This is a serious capability with serious payroll.

Level 4, AI Catalyst. The organisation reshapes how its industry works. There are a handful of these in the world and none of them got there by targeting it.

Your target is Level 2. That is not a consolation prize; it is the level where the economics work for a business your size. Below it, you are paying for tools nobody uses well. Above it, at Level 3, you are funding an AI team whose salaries most SMEs cannot carry, and in my experience do not need to. A healthy distribution for a company of twenty to two hundred people is roughly: almost nobody AI Unaware, about one in ten AI Aware, six in ten of your people at AI Ready, two in ten deeper specialists, and a couple of pioneers. Most of your staff reach Level 2 and stay there, productively, for years.

There is a second ladder inside the first: your people each sit somewhere on the same scale personally. A five-person leadership team can contain one enthusiast and four sceptics, and the sceptics decide what actually gets used. That is why the framework assesses the organisation and its people as separate instruments, which is the next lesson.

In the field: professional services. A professional-services firm used AI meeting summarisation with action tracking: support staff reclaimed five to eight hours per week, and lost action items, the ones humans miss when taking manual notes, dropped by seventy to eighty per cent. That is a Level 2 outcome: a workflow changed, run by the firm’s own people, on the firm’s own meetings.

Try this. Place each of your key people, and yourself, privately on the five levels. Where is the boss? Where are the sceptics? Keep the list; you will compare it against your assessment results in the next lesson.