Automation readiness is not a measure of how many AI subscriptions a company owns. It describes whether a specific process is sufficiently understood, accessible and governed to be changed safely.
Process readiness
Can the team describe the trigger, steps, decisions and final outcome? Are common exceptions known? Is there a consistent definition of a completed case? If different employees perform the process in incompatible ways, agree the operating method before automating it.
Data readiness
Identify every data source and owner. Check whether records are complete, consistently formatted and legally available for the proposed use. Classify personal, financial and commercially sensitive fields. Decide which information the AI actually needs; sending an entire record is rarely necessary.
Integration readiness
Confirm that the systems provide appropriate APIs or export mechanisms. Check permissions, rate limits and test environments. Record who owns administrator access and how service credentials will be stored and rotated.
Governance readiness
Name the business owner who can approve rules and accept the result. Define decisions that require human approval and situations that must be escalated. Decide how staff and customers can challenge or correct an automated outcome.
Operational readiness
Choose who receives failure alerts and who has authority to pause the workflow. Document a manual fallback. Define backup, logging and retention requirements. An automation without an incident owner is not ready for production.
Measurement readiness
Capture the current volume, completion time, staff effort and error rate. Select a primary success measure and a review date. Without a baseline, the business may know that the workflow is active but not whether it is useful.
People readiness
Explain the objective to the people doing the work. Their knowledge is needed to identify exceptions, and their trust affects adoption. Training should cover normal use, limitations and what to do when the output appears wrong.
If several sections of this checklist remain unanswered, begin with a short discovery exercise rather than a build. Readiness work is not delay; it prevents technical implementation from hard-coding confusion.