Readiness has very little to do with how technical your business is. It has everything to do with five plain things.
1. You have a specific task in mind
"We should use AI somewhere" is not a project. "We want every inbound lead answered within a minute" is. Readiness starts with a real, named task - not a general wish to look more modern.
2. The information the task needs is reachable
An agent can only work with what it can get to. If the data for your task lives in a system, a spreadsheet, or a shared folder, you are in good shape. If it lives only in one person's head, that has to be written down first - and that is worth doing regardless.
3. The task happens often enough to matter
Automating something that happens twice a year rarely pays off. The value comes from frequency. If a task runs daily or weekly, even a small time saving compounds into something real.
4. Someone can tell good work from bad
You need a person who can look at what the agent did and judge whether it was right - not to babysit it forever, but to check it during the early weeks and catch anything off. If no one can evaluate the output, you are not ready to trust it yet.
5. You can start small
The businesses that succeed with AI run a pilot: one task, measured, for a few weeks, before expanding. If your expectation is a flip-the-switch transformation, reset it. A willingness to start narrow is itself a readiness signal.
If most of these are yes
You are ready - pick the task and start. If several are no, that is useful to know too. The fix is almost always process, not technology: write down the knowledge, pick a sharper task, commit to a pilot. Get those in place and the AI part becomes the straightforward part.