Why AI Readiness Should Be Your Business’s Top Priority

Myra Roldan
5 min readJan 16, 2025
UnDesto AI Readiness App

These days many businesses are investing heavily in AI technologies, but 76% of companies lack an AI policy. Most are diving headfirst into AI implementation without laying the groundwork for success.

Why Skipping AI Readiness Costs More Than You Think

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the centerpiece of business innovation. Companies everywhere are rushing to adopt AI tools, hoping to streamline operations, gain insights, and outperform competitors. I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly over the past year since Generative AI has become a silver bullet, and the costs of neglecting readiness are far higher than most businesses realize.

Let me tell you about a company we’ll call BrightLane Stores. Eager to optimize their supply chain, they invested nearly $750,000 in a shiny new AI inventory management system. They were excited about what it could do, like predict stock needs, reduce waste, and improve customer satisfaction. What they didn’t do was assess their readiness. Lack of readiness resulted in: fragmented data, overwhelmed IT systems, and frustrated employees. Within 18 months, the project was abandoned, and they spent over $1 million on a tool that failed to deliver the results they were looking for.

The Hidden Costs of Skipping Readiness

BrightLane’s story isn’t unique. Data shows that 76% of businesses don’t have an AI policy in place, meaning they lack the governance needed to guide ethical, secure, and effective AI use. Additionally, 45% of companies report talent shortages, while 54% admit their IT systems aren’t scalable or flexible enough to handle AI workloads. These gaps lead to operational inefficiencies, compliance risks, and, ultimately, wasted resources.

Skipping readiness doesn’t just cost money, it costs trust, morale, and momentum. Employees lose faith in leadership, teams resist future AI initiatives, and customers bear the brunt of the inefficiencies. By the time companies realize what went wrong, they’ve lost valuable time that could have been spent building a competitive edge. Recovery can cost even more having a negative impact on their bottom line.

Why AI Readiness Matters

AI readiness is the foundation for success. It’s about preparing your business — strategically, operationally, and culturally — to adopt AI in a way that delivers meaningful results. Without readiness, implementing AI is like building a house without a foundation. Sure, it might look good for a while, but it won’t stand the test of time.

Readiness involves several critical components:

  • Governance: Do you have policies to ensure ethical and compliant AI use?
  • Data: Is your data clean, accessible, and integrated?
  • Infrastructure: Can your IT systems handle the demands of AI?
  • Talent and Culture: Are your people equipped and motivated to work with AI?

Skipping these steps is like trying to assemble furniture without reading the instructions. You might manage to piece something together, but it’s likely to be unstable and far from what it’s supposed to be.

Enter the AI Readiness App

After working with businesses across industries, we noticed a trend: many organizations had no idea where they stood in terms of AI readiness. That’s why we developed the AI Readiness App, a tool designed to assess your organization’s preparedness at a high-level.

Try the AI Readiness App

The app evaluates readiness across four key areas — leadership, operations, innovation, and customer focus. It’s simple to use, you answer a few questions and are provided a readiness score and actionable insights. More importantly, it benchmarks your performance against market standards, so you know exactly where you stand and what needs attention.

AI Readiness Score

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Let’s go back to BrightLane Stores. If they’d used UnDesto’s AI Readiness App, they would have identified their gaps before implementation. They could have consulted with UnDesto AI to clean and consolidate their data, upgrade their IT systems for redundancy and scalability, establish governance policies and an AI strategy, develop and implement a change management strategy, and trained their employees. These steps might have cost ~$250,000, but it would have saved them over $750,000 in failed implementation costs.

When businesses skip readiness, they often end up backtracking — spending more money, time, and effort fixing problems that could have been avoided. Readiness isn’t just a smart step; it’s a necessary one.

What Happens When You’re Ready

When businesses take the time to prioritize AI readiness, the results speak for themselves. These organizations avoid the common pitfalls that come with rushing into AI adoption, such as costly delays, failed implementations, and wasted resources. Instead, they position themselves for success by addressing critical gaps upfront, ensuring that their systems, processes, and people are aligned to support AI integration. They recognize that investing time and resources into preparation pays off in the form of smoother implementations, measurable returns on investment, and lasting competitive advantages.

By building a strong foundation, these businesses create AI systems that are scalable and flexible, designed to grow alongside their needs. For example, a ready organization doesn’t just implement an AI tool for today’s challenges; they implement one that can adapt to tomorrow’s opportunities. This forward-thinking approach minimizes risk, reduces long-term costs, and fosters innovation.

Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late

The clock is ticking. According to recent studies, 59% of businesses believe they have only one year to implement AI strategies before losing their competitive edge. Waiting until the last minute means rushing into AI adoption without the proper foundation — a risk that most businesses can’t afford.

UnDesto’s AI Readiness App is not just about pointing out what’s wrong, but it’s about giving you the tools and insights to help you understand how ready your organization really is for AI.

Start with readiness. Build a strong foundation. And set your business up for success in an AI-driven world. Try the UnDesto AI Readiness App today. We’d love to hear your feedback, leave it in the comments.

Try UnDesto’s AI Readiness App — Click here

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Myra Roldan
Myra Roldan

Written by Myra Roldan

Myra Roldan is Principal Applied AI Engineer with a decades of experience in (AI) and disruptive technologies such as Blockchain and Mixed Reality.

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