10decodersIs your organisation ready to choose an AI platform?
The fastest way to waste a budget on AI is to choose a platform before you know what you are solving for. In 10 questions, see exactly where your organisation stands — and what it takes to make a decision that holds.
Most AI platform decisions get reopened. Here's why.
A platform chosen before the mandate is clear, the constraints are mapped and the baseline is measured will be revisited. The cost is not just the licence — it is the team time, the architecture work, and the six months you lose while a committee decides what to try next.
No dated trigger
The board wants AI. Nothing forces a decision on a specific date. Without a dated consequence there is no mandate — only anxiety, and anxiety does not produce a shortlist.
Unnamed blockers
The person who can stop the decision is not in the evaluation room. The veto sits in security, legal, or a parent company — and surfaces after money has been committed.
No baseline for the use case
You can name the workflow but not price it. Without volume, minutes per item and headcount, there is no ROI — only a slide deck that gets challenged at the next board cycle.
Constraints discovered late
Data residency, PHI, PII or customer contract terms treated as a security review gate rather than a design input. Prototypes built before these are mapped get rebuilt.
No agreed measure of success
Two people in leadership would give different answers to what "working" looks like in twelve months. That gap matters more than any evaluation criterion on the shortlist.
Procurement and proof conflated
Standardising on a platform and testing whether AI works for you at all are two different exercises. Running both at once produces a licence for a use case nobody validated.
Rate your AI readiness in 10 questions
Ten questions across mandate, authority, constraints, baseline and proof. Answer the way things actually are — the score is only useful if you do.
Question 1 of 10 · Mandate
If you spend nothing on AI for the next twelve months, what specifically gets worse?
We are looking for a dated consequence — a contract, a deadline, a competitor move, a cost that grows.
