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Why do government projects stall in the pilot stage? Often it happens because departments rush to adopt AI and ignore the foundations. This article shows how to assess your organisation’s AI maturity and the steps you should take to ensure your AI project can scale.

AI adoption across central government is accelerating, driven by high-level pressure to improve services, increase efficiency, and boost productivity. But as departments rush to launch pilots, how many of these will scale to something meaningful?

You’re probably feeling the push to adopt AI as well.

But is your organisation ready to build and scale AI? Do you know where your hidden vulnerabilities are and what you need to focus on to adopt it safely?

The first step to successfully adopting AI is to check if your organisation is ready.

Think of it like a multi-story building. It’s possible to build upwards quickly. But if you don’t secure the foundations, you risk building something that’s at best structurally unsound, or worse, dangerous.

 

So, how can you check where your organisation stands?

Before starting new initiatives or investing in new tools, it’s important to know where your organisation stands.

A good AI readiness assessment looks at four main pillars: culture, education and skills, assurance and governance, and data.

You want to interrogate these areas by asking a series of targeted questions around them. For example:

• Does leadership see AI as a strategic priority and actively support its adoption?
• Does your team understand how to use AI and its risks and benefits?
• Does your organisation have the structures in place to use AI safely, ethically and responsibly?
• Is your data ready for AI or trapped in legacy systems?

Benchmark your readiness: Take our 3-minute Interactive AI Readiness Assessment to get an instant maturity score and identify hidden gaps in your organisation.

With our clients, we run workshops that involve various stakeholders from the organisation and gather details around those pillars.

Based on the answers, we provide a custom visual readiness map of where the organisation is on its AI journey. Typically, organisations fall into one of three stages:

• Initiating: They have identified suitable use cases to pilot or test AI.
• Scaling: They’re ready to rollout further following successful AI pilots.
• Integrated: AI is built into the organisation’s way of working, changing workflows and supporting key services and decisions.

Alignment, the secret to scaling AI?

The value of workshops like these is alignment.

The process of discussing questions around set topics creates an almost automatic buy-in. Everyone gains a common understanding of the organisation’s current position and sees the reasoning behind the results. And that makes it easier to agree priorities and what to do next.

Besides alignment, these sessions also help to:

• build confidence by showing how adopting AI fits with organisational and policy goals
• find and potentially address gaps in data, skills, and governance
• plot an organisation’s AI path and prioritise the practical steps needed to move forward safely.
• identify what makes a suitable AI use case to pilot, test & scale.
• lay the foundations for a business case or a roadmap to grow AI across the business.

Starting and scaling AI isn’t easy. But it becomes simpler when you understand your existing capabilities and processes, your gaps, and what you can and cannot do going forward.

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