AI Readiness Assessment

What you get from the AI readiness assessment

The Arcesso AI readiness assessment ends with a ranked, costed list of AI projects and a 90-day plan for the first one. Every item is specific to your business and written so your finance lead, your operations lead and your engineers can all use it.

• Ranked use-case list: each automation, agent or AI feature with an estimated build range, monthly running cost, payback period and main risk.
• Build vs buy call: where an off-the-shelf tool is enough and where custom work is justified.
• Data gap report: what data is missing, messy or locked away, and what it takes to fix it.
• Model test results: how current models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google perform on your real examples for the top use cases.
• 90-day plan: the first project, its success metric, timeline and owner.
• Governance checklist: the minimum data rules and approval steps to have in place before launch.

Who the AI readiness assessment is for

The assessment is for startups and companies of roughly 5 to 500 people that know AI could help but do not know where to start, or have too many ideas to choose from. It also suits teams that tried an AI tool, saw mixed results and want a clear view before spending more.

You do not need a data team or a technical founder. You need a few people who know the daily work and access to the systems where that work happens.

The assessment is not the right choice if you already know exactly what to build and have the data ready. In that case, skip it and go straight to a fixed-price scope for the build, which is faster and costs less. It is also not designed for enterprise-wide AI strategy across many business units; larger consultancies are set up for that work.

AI readiness assessment vs free AI audit vs full consulting engagement

A fixed-fee assessment sits between a free sales audit and a long consulting engagement. It is paid, so the work is real and the output is yours. It is short, so you get answers in two weeks rather than months.

A free audit is a reasonable first look, but it is usually a sales step for one vendor's product. A full consulting engagement makes sense for large organizations with many business units and a change program to run.

Arcesso's assessment is built for the middle: teams that want a decision they can act on this quarter. Because the same engineers who score the use cases also build them, the cost and timeline estimates come from delivery experience, not from a template, and they become the starting point for any fixed-price quote.

How the two-week assessment runs

The assessment runs over two weeks with about 4 to 6 hours of your team's time in total. Week one is discovery: a kickoff call, short interviews with the people who do the work and read-only access to the systems and sample data we need.

Week two is analysis. We score every opportunity on payback, risk and effort, check the data behind the top candidates and run quick model tests on real examples. Where a use case depends on data that does not exist yet, we say so instead of guessing.

The assessment ends with a recorded readout. A senior engineer walks your team through the ranked list, the build vs buy calls and the 90-day plan, and answers questions. You keep the documents and the recording, and they are written so any competent team can act on them, not only Arcesso. Access we were given is removed at the end, and a mutual NDA can be signed before any data is shared.

What the assessment costs and how the fee credit works

The AI readiness assessment is a fixed $3,999, agreed before any work starts. There are no hourly charges, no extras for the readout and no surprise invoices if the interviews run long.

The $3,999 fee is about 20% below the comparable two-week assessments we track ($4,999 to $5,000 as published in October 2026) and covers up to three teams and systems in scope; larger scopes are quoted before you sign. See the pricing page for the full list.

If you build any project from the plan with Arcesso, the full assessment fee is credited to that build. If you take the plan to your own engineers or another vendor, that is fine too. You own the documents, the scoring and the recording either way. The point of a fixed fee is that you pay for a clear answer, and the answer is yours to use.

What happens after the AI readiness assessment

After the assessment, most teams start the first project from the 90-day plan within a few weeks. That might be a two-week AI agent pilot, an n8n automation, a chatbot on your help center or an AI voice receptionist for after-hours calls.

Because the scoping work is already done, the build quote comes quickly and is a fixed price. Kickoff happens within 14 days of signing, a senior engineer leads the work, and you see a working demo every week.

Some teams decide the best next step is buying a tool or fixing data first, and the plan says so plainly. Others keep Arcesso on a monthly advisory retainer to review progress and update the ranking every quarter as models and costs change. Whatever you choose, the 90-day plan gives you dates and a success metric to hold the work against.