AI FACTORY 5-MINUTE SELF-ASSESSMENT
AI Factory Readiness Scorecard
Every serious company has AI pilots. Almost none has an AI Factory. Is your organization ready – not just the tech? Score yourself across the five dimensions of an AI operating model and find out whether your pilots can scale or whether you're stuck in POC hell.
How to score: tick every statement that is true in your organization today, not on the roadmap, not "in progress". Each tick = 1 point. Be honest: this scorecard is for you, not for your board deck.
1. Strategy: Is AI a priority or a hobby?
Score: 0 /4
2. Governance: Control or hope?
Score: 0 /4
3. Platform: Shared capability or one-off stacks?
Score: 0 /4
4. Data: Fuel or excuse?
Score: 0 /4
5. People: A capability or after-hours heroics?
Score: 0 /4
Your result: 0 /20
Find your score range below and read it as a diagnosis, not a grade. Every stage has a logical next move — the goal is to make it deliberately, not by accident.
AI Factory in motion
You have the rare thing: an operating model, not a collection of pilots. AI moves from idea to production through a repeatable path, with ownership, governance and a shared platform behind it. The risk at this stage is drift; intake gets political, costs creep, and standards erode as volume grows.
Next move: industrialise what works. Formalise use case intake, manage AI as a portfolio with cost discipline, and measure value per use case as rigorously as you measure model performance.
Emerging Factory
The foundations are real, but uneven. Some dimensions already run like a factory; others still run on goodwill and individual heroics. That unevenness is invisible at pilot scale, and expensive at production scale, where your weakest dimension sets the pace for everything else.
Next move: don't start new initiatives. Find your lowest-scoring dimension, give it a named owner and a deadline, and close that gap first. One strong dimension can't compensate for a broken one.
Emerging Factory
You can build AI – you just can't ship it. Pilots demo well, then stall at security review, integration, or the question "who owns this in production?". Each project rebuilds the same plumbing from scratch, so cost stays high and value stays theoretical. More demos won't fix this. They only grow the backlog of things that will never scale.
Next move: stop counting pilots, start counting production deployments. Pick one use case with a committed business owner and push it all the way to production, building the reusable path (platform, governance, data access) as you go.
Experiment mode
AI is happening in pockets – driven by curiosity, not strategy. That's a fine place to learn, but a dangerous place to stay, because competitors who industrialise AI compound their advantage every quarter. The good news: you carry no baggage of failed pilots and shadow tooling.
Next move: secure an executive sponsor, pick one use case tied to a real business KPI, and run it as a governed POC designed from day one as the first module of your Factory – not another throwaway demo.
One more thing: your total tells you the stage, but your lowest-scoring dimension tells you what to fix first, that's your bottleneck. A 14/20 with Governance at 1/4 is a different problem than a 14/20 with Data at 1/4, and it needs a different first move.
Don't Guess Your Next Move. Review It With Us – Free
Bring this filled-in scorecard to a free 45–60 min AI Factory Maturity Review with a DS STREAM AI Strategy Advisor. We'll walk through your gaps and define 1–2 priority moves for the next 90 days. Limited spots.
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