AI readiness for SMEs — practical assessment guide
Before buying another AI licence, check whether your data, processes and governance can support a useful 90-day pilot.
Readiness checklist
- Process clarity — can you describe the workflow in steps a junior could follow?
- Data access — is the source of truth in Drive/SharePoint/CRM, or in someone’s head?
- Permission hygiene — would you be comfortable letting a tool see that folder?
- Owner — who decides “good enough” and who fixes wrong outputs?
- Risk — customer data, regulated content, or confidential IP in scope?
Good first SME use cases
- Internal knowledge search over approved Drive folders
- Drafting first-pass proposals from a structured brief
- Summarising long email threads with human review
- Extracting fields from repetitive PDFs into a spreadsheet/CRM
Avoid starting with fully autonomous customer-facing decisions. Teknikal’s AI solutions work starts with constrained pilots and clear human checkpoints.
90-day outline
- Days 1–15 — pick one use case, map data and permissions
- Days 16–45 — build a thin pilot with logging and review
- Days 46–75 — measure time saved / error rate with real users
- Days 76–90 — keep, kill or expand — write the decision down