What the assessment covers
Adopting AI successfully depends less on choosing a model than on the basics around it: whether your information is organised, whether processes are written down, whether people have time to learn and whether there are rules for confidential data. The assessment asks two or three short questions on each of twelve dimensions and scores them from 0 to 100.
- Strategy and leadership commitment, and use cases you have identified.
- Data: where documents and client information live and how consistently they are stored.
- Processes: how standardised and documented recurring work is.
- Tools and integration: current software, and whether systems can exchange data.
- Skills, training and the time people can give to new ways of working.
- Governance, data protection, information security, client confidentiality and measurement of results.
Your maturity stage and three projects
Your overall score places you in one of five stages: Exploring, Foundation, Pilot-ready, Scale-ready or AI-native. Each stage comes with a short description of what firms at that point typically do next. Most small firms are at Exploring or Foundation, and that is a sensible place to start from.
You also get three recommended projects chosen from your answers: one that builds on your strongest dimensions so you can show results quickly, and others that address your weakest dimensions, because a pilot built on missing foundations rarely survives contact with daily work.
AI, confidentiality and the EU AI Act
For law firms, notaries, accountants and clinics, confidentiality comes first. Before using any AI tool with client data, check where the data is processed, whether it is used for training, what your contract says and what your professional body recommends. Many providers offer business plans that exclude customer data from training.
The EU AI Act introduces obligations in stages from 2025, mainly for providers and deployers of high-risk systems, plus AI literacy duties for organisations that use AI. Most office uses such as drafting or summarising are not high-risk, but you should know which tools you use and train staff to use them responsibly. This assessment is a planning aid, not legal advice.
Making use of the result
Share the result with your partners or management team and agree on one project to start within the next quarter. Assign an owner, a budget and a simple measure of success, such as hours saved per month or response time to enquiries. Repeat the assessment after six months to see which dimensions improved.