AI Readiness Assessment: Mapping ROI for Small Businesses Before Deployment

Every small company has a 'Bob' -- the guy who can fix the label printer, override the ERP, and recite part numbers like phone digits. Bob is gold and his future is bright post-AI deployment. But for now, he’s also a single point of failure you can’t scale, much less automate. That’s why Phase 1 is relentless documentation.

Step 1: Stakeholder interviews

Our AI readiness assessment for small businesses starts with mapping what’s really happening.  We shadow Bob for a morning, timing each mouse click with a stopwatch and photographing every sticky note on his monitor.  Well, not really.  But we do help to create clarity and documentation about all of the 'roads that lead to Bob.' Then we sit with accounting, sales, and IT to stitch the full picture. The output is a swim-lane map that finally shows where data crosses departments—and where it sinks without a trace.

Step 2: Data & compliance audit

A simple script samples three months of records for:

• Duplicate rows

• Missing fields

• Personally identifiable info leaking into comments

We score each source green, yellow, or red. Red means “fix the mess before dreaming of GPT.”

Step 3: ROI heat-map

We list workflows down one axis, scoring them on volume, variability, and value of error. Even the most cautious CFOs crack a smile when that ROI heat-map lights up.

The deliverable

• 12-page executive summary in plain language

• Spreadsheet of automation candidates with payback windows

• Compliance checklists

• 30-60-90-day action plan including change-management milestones

Readiness isn’t glamourous, but it’s compound interest: every cleaned table, every documented decision tree, makes the next pilot faster and safer.

Skip Phase 1, and future-you will be digging through Bob’s desk wishing he had written it all down.