We've audited dozens of businesses for AI readiness. The £500 AI Audit has become our most popular service — not because it's cheap, but because it's the fastest way to get an honest, expert assessment of where AI can actually help your business. Here's exactly what happens.
Why an Audit Exists
Every week, we get enquiries from businesses who want to "implement AI." When we ask what they want to automate, the answer is usually some variation of "everything" or "we're not sure, but we know we need it."
This is like walking into a mechanic and saying "fix my car" without mentioning what's wrong. We could start replacing parts at random, or we could diagnose the problem first. The audit is the diagnosis.
What Happens During the Audit
Phase 1: Discovery Interview (60-90 minutes)
We sit down (or video call) with the business owner and key team members. This isn't a sales pitch — it's an investigation. We ask questions like:
- Walk me through a typical day for your operations team. What do they do from 9 to 5?
- Where do you feel like your team spends time on work that's "below their pay grade"?
- What are the biggest bottlenecks in your business right now?
- What tools and systems do you use daily? (We literally make a list)
- How does data flow between your systems? Who moves it? How often?
- What's your current tech spend? What produces ROI and what doesn't?
We're not just listening for problems. We're mapping your business's operational architecture — how information flows, where decisions are made, and where value gets created versus where time gets wasted.
Phase 2: Systems Analysis
We review your tech stack with an integration lens:
- Which of your tools have APIs? (Most modern SaaS tools do, but many businesses don't know this)
- Where are the data silos? (Information trapped in one system that another system needs)
- What are the manual handoffs? (Every time a human copies data from system A to system B)
- What data do you generate that you're not currently using?
Phase 3: Opportunity Identification
This is where the expertise matters. Based on our analysis, we identify specific AI opportunities ranked by three criteria:
- Impact: How much time/money will this save?
- Feasibility: How easy is this to implement given your current infrastructure?
- Risk: What could go wrong, and how serious would it be?
What You Get: The Deliverable
Every audit produces a written report that includes:
1. AI Readiness Score
A clear, honest assessment of your business's readiness for AI deployment. This covers your data infrastructure, process documentation, integration capability, team readiness, and strategic clarity. Most businesses score between 4-7 out of 10. That's normal — and it's useful, because it tells you exactly what to fix first.
2. Opportunity Map
A prioritised list of 5-10 specific AI opportunities in your business, each with:
- A clear description of what the agent would do
- Estimated time saving (hours per week)
- Estimated cost saving (annual)
- Implementation complexity (low / medium / high)
- Recommended timeline
3. Quick Wins Report
The 2-3 opportunities that deliver the highest ROI with the lowest implementation effort. These are your "start here" projects — designed to demonstrate value quickly, build team confidence, and fund the next phase of AI adoption.
4. Technology Recommendations
Specific, actionable recommendations for your tech stack. This might include tools to adopt, integrations to build, or data infrastructure improvements needed before AI deployment.
5. Roadmap
A 3-6 month phased plan for AI deployment, starting with quick wins and building toward more complex automations. Each phase builds on the previous one, so you're never biting off more than you can chew.
Patterns We See Over and Over
After conducting many audits, certain patterns emerge:
The Data Entry Trap
Almost every business has at least one person whose primary job is entering the same data into multiple systems. CRM, accounting, project management, reporting — the same information, typed in four times. This is always the easiest and most impactful thing to automate.
The Report Factory
Someone — usually a senior person who should be doing strategic work — spends 4-8 hours every week compiling reports by pulling data from multiple systems, formatting it in Excel, and emailing it to stakeholders. Every single time, an agent can do this in minutes.
The Inbox Bottleneck
Customer enquiries, supplier emails, internal requests — all arrive in one inbox, and one person triages them manually. Classification, routing, and initial response can all be handled by an agent, with humans only involved for complex or high-value cases.
The Approval Queue
Decisions that should take minutes take days because they're stuck in someone's email queue. Smart routing and auto-approval for low-risk decisions can accelerate your entire operations pipeline.
What Happens After
The audit is diagnostic, not prescriptive. After you receive your report, you have three options:
- Implement yourself. The report gives you everything you need. Some clients have internal technical teams who take our recommendations and build the solutions themselves. Great — that's what the report is for.
- Engage us to implement. If you want us to build and deploy the agents, we scope each project individually based on the audit findings. Typical first projects run £5,000-£15,000 and take 2-4 weeks.
- Do nothing. Some businesses genuinely aren't ready yet. If the audit reveals foundational issues (bad data, undocumented processes, team resistance), it's better to fix those first. We'll tell you honestly if that's the case.
We believe the audit pays for itself. Even if you never engage us again, the operational insights alone are worth the £500 investment. And most clients don't stop at the audit — because once you see the opportunities laid out clearly, the question isn't "should we do this?" It's "why haven't we done this already?"
