Earlier this year I decided to leave the BBC and set up a consulting practice helping SMEs adopt AI into their workflows.
The obvious question was whether SMEs actually know if they’re ready for AI, or whether they just have a vague sense that they should be doing something.
I didn’t know the answer, so I built a tool to find out.
It’s a 5-minute AI readiness assessment. Twenty questions about how a business operates, what’s already automated, where the friction is, and how much appetite there is for change. At the end, the tool generates a report with a readiness score, the top three AI opportunities for that specific business, and a recommended first step.
It’s live at assessment.rethinkworks.co.uk.
Building it taught me a few things.
The first version generated reports that were comprehensive and completely useless. Long, technically correct, full of caveats. Nobody is going to read that and know what to do next. I had to go back and be ruthless about what a business owner actually needs from a report like this. Not an overview. A clear answer to: what should I do first, and why?
The second lesson was that the questions matter more than the model. I kept tweaking the prompt and getting marginal improvements. When I rewrote the questions themselves, making them more specific and more grounded in how businesses actually work, the reports got significantly better. Garbage in, garbage out applies to AI assessments just as much as data pipelines.
The third thing I noticed is that most businesses have more going for them than they think. The tool surfaces patterns in how a business already operates that make it a better or worse candidate for specific types of AI. A company with clear, repeatable processes and one person manually doing the same thing every day is a much easier AI win than one where everything is bespoke. Most people don’t see that until someone maps it out for them.
That’s the consulting insight I was looking for. The assessment isn’t just a lead magnet. It’s the start of a conversation about where AI can actually move the needle, not just where it sounds exciting.
If you run an SME and you’re wondering where to start with AI, give it a go.