AI Readiness / Ship Audit
A fixed-scope, fixed-fee read on whether you’re actually ready to ship AI.
Engineering and product leaders who need an honest, evidence-based answer before committing budget to an AI build.
You have an AI idea and pressure to move. Nobody has an objective read on whether your data and infrastructure are ready, or whether your team is. Optimism from inside the building isn’t evidence, and a vendor pitch isn’t a plan.
- Week 1 Audit data and infrastructure
We inspect your data pipeline and infrastructure against the use case you name. Every gap gets a severity, not a guess.
- Week 1–2 Score team and process readiness
We talk to the team that would own the pilot. We score how ready your process is to catch a bad output before a user sees it.
- Week 2–3 Build the risk register
Every risk we find gets a named owner and a severity rating. Nothing stays vague.
- Week 3–4 Deliver the plan and the call
You get the written report and the risk register. Then you get a scoped pilot plan and a clear go or no-go.
- Use-case clarity
- We read your use-case spec and your target metric. A named user and a baselined threshold are the pass bar.
- Data readiness
- We check where the data lives and who can access it. Then we confirm it matches production, not a curated demo set.
- Eval & quality maturity
- We look for a labelled eval set and a real pass threshold. A manual spot-check does not score as mature.
- Production hardening
- We check for retries and a fallback path. We also confirm cost and latency actually get watched once it ships.
- Team & ownership
- We confirm one named owner has both the time and the mandate to ship this.
- Security & governance
- We check whether access controls and a data-handling policy already exist for this use case.
- Data and infrastructure audit against the specific use case
- Risk register with named owners and severity
- Readiness scoring across the stack
- A pilot plan scoped to prove value fast
- KPI and success-metric design
Everything below transfers to you at handover, no retainer, no lock-in.
- A written readiness report
- A risk register with severity and mitigations
- A scoped pilot plan
- A KPI framework to judge success against
- A signed, board-ready deliverable
- Not a build. We assess and recommend. A pilot build is a separate, phased engagement.
- Not an open-ended retainer. The scope and the fee are both fixed before we start.
- Not a guaranteed yes. If the honest finding is “not ready,” the report says so.
- Skip this if you haven’t chosen a use case yet. Run the free AI Readiness Scorecard first.
- Skip this if you need an independent read on someone else’s system for a deal. Read Technical Diligence instead.
- Skip this if you already have a scoped pilot plan and just need engineering hands. Talk to us about a phased build instead.
2–4 weeks, fixed scope
Fixed fee, confirmed after first contact
Deliverables are licensed to you in full on completion. Standard mutual NDA covers any data or systems we access during the engagement.
You own every line.#
Explicit handover terms, not fine print — this is what transfers to you when we're done.
- All source code transfers to you at handover.
- Infrastructure-as-code for the whole system transfers to you.
- The eval suiteAn eval suite is a versioned set of test cases that measures whether outputs are good. and tests transfer to you.
- Credentials and accounts we provision transfer to you.
- Documentation and runbooks transfer to you.
- No retainer required to keep it running.
- No kill-switch, no vendor lock-in — operate and extend it without us.
Questions, answered.#
The questions we get asked most, answered plainly: no hedging, no marketing copy.
01 What does the audit cover?
Data quality and access, infrastructure and security posture, and team and process readiness for the specific AI use case you’re considering. Each one gets a score, backed by evidence.
Link to this answer: What does the audit cover?02 How long does it take?
Two to four weeks, fixed scope, regardless of what we find along the way.
Link to this answer: How long does it take?03 Does our data leave our environment?
No. We assess in place wherever possible and work under your existing access controls and NDAs — the report leaves, your data doesn’t.
Link to this answer: Does our data leave our environment?04 What do we walk away with?
A written readiness report and a risk register. The engagement also produces a scoped pilot plan and a KPI framework. You keep every document.
Link to this answer: What do we walk away with?05 How is this different from the free AI Readiness Scorecard?
The scorecard is a self-scored, ten-question read you can run in a few minutes. The Ship Audit scores the same six dimensions against evidence from your data and your infrastructure, not your own answers to a form.
Link to this answer: How is this different from the free AI Readiness Scorecard?06 What happens after the audit?
You take the report and the pilot plan and decide. If you want us to build it, the phased build is priced and scoped against the plan the audit produced, not a guess.
Link to this answer: What happens after the audit?