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.

Listen to this lesson · narrated by Laurence Liew

Five pillar cards in a row, numbered P1 to P5: Leadership & Culture, Ethics & Governance, Business Value, Data Foundation, Infrastructure & Standards

Quick win this week. Write down which of the five pillars you believe is your organisation’s weakest. Keep the note. When your assessment results arrive, check whether you were right.

Lesson two showed you the ladder: five levels from AI Unaware to AI Catalyst. Lesson three handed you the two instruments that place you on it, oAIRI for the organisation and pAIRI for each person. This lesson is about what the instruments actually measure: five pillars. Every AIRI question belongs to one of them, and every pillar is scored on the same five levels.

P1, Leadership & Culture. Is there commitment and capability to succeed? Sponsorship for the work, people with the skills, and the willingness to change how work is done. This pillar carries double weight in the Decision Engine, because most AI projects fail on people, not technology.

P2, Ethics & Governance. Are risks managed and ethics considered? Someone accountable for every AI decision, privacy and bias handled, and the rules written down. This pillar is the gate: your overall level can never exceed it. Weak governance caps everything else, whatever the rest of the scores say.

P3, Business Value. Can value be identified and captured? A use case that sits on a real bottleneck, and a number that moves when the work moves.

P4, Data Foundation. Is data accessible and of sufficient quality? The examples exist somewhere in your business, they are usable, and someone owns them.

P5, Infrastructure & Standards. Are tools, infrastructure, and standards in place? What you subscribe to, integrate, and configure, and the discipline to keep it running.

Only two of the five, Data Foundation and Infrastructure & Standards, are technical. The other three are the work of business leaders, which is why AI readiness is a leadership matter before it is an IT project. The organisation and the person are measured on the same five pillars, with different questions: oAIRI asks about the organisation, pAIRI asks about you.

The next lesson turns these five pillars into a number you can act on: the AIRI Decision Engine, the scoring method for choosing between candidate projects.

Try this. Take the pillar you wrote down at the top, your organisation’s weakest. Write one sentence on what it would take to move it up one level. That sentence is the start of your AI plan.