Home / Guides / How to Score Your Company for AI Readiness

How to score your company for AI readiness.

Four questions. Six departments. Twenty-four points. The lowest-scoring department is the first seat to fill with an AI employee. Here is how to answer the questions honestly.

The Runs-Itself Scorecard is deliberately small. Twenty-four questions is enough to find the biggest gap and small enough to answer in ten minutes. The point is not to grade yourself on a hundred axes. It is to pick the first seat to fill. This article walks through the four questions and shows what a one-point answer looks like for each department.

The four questions

1. There is one owner today (a person on the team, not you).
2. If that owner is out for a week, the work keeps going.
3. An AI employee could own this department this month.
4. You know exactly what stays human in this department.

Each one scores zero or one, applied to each of the six departments: marketing, sales, operations, customer success, leadership, finance. Max 24. The band tells you the shape of the problem; the lowest-scoring department tells you the first move.

Question 1: there is one owner today

Not “the team.” One person. If the ads department is owned by “marketing,” the answer is zero. If it is owned by Jamie, who checks the Meta dashboard every morning and would notice if cost per lead doubled, the answer is one.

Why it matters: a department without a single owner is a department that cannot be delegated — not to a human, not to an agent. The first move with a zero on this question is to name an owner, even temporarily. The agent inherits the rules the owner writes.

Question 2: the work keeps going if the owner is out

Vacation. Illness. Life. If the ads department goes dark when Jamie goes dark, the answer is zero. If the campaigns keep running inside the rules Jamie wrote down and someone else reads the dashboard on Wednesday, the answer is one.

Why it matters: a department where the knowledge lives only in the owner’s head is a department you cannot hire into. The rules have to exist outside the owner before any seat (human or agent) can be added. The first move with a zero is to write the rules down this week.

Question 3: an AI employee could own this department this month

This is the question most people answer wrong. “Could” does not mean “everything.” It means one seat in the department, with a clear loop, measurable outputs and a review gate. If marketing has one seat the agent could clearly own — the media buyer, say — the answer is one. If every seat is tangled with every other, the answer is zero.

Why it matters: AI-readiness is not a question of taste. It is a question of whether the work has an entry (input), an exit (output), and a check (a number that moves). If any seat in the department has that shape, the answer is one. The first move with a zero is to find the one seat with the clearest loop and start writing its rules.

Question 4: you know exactly what stays human

If you cannot name the three things in this department you would never let an agent do, the answer is zero. If you can — the activate button on the ads, the pricing change, the hard pass — the answer is one.

Why it matters: automation that cannot stop itself is not automation. The agent needs a clear envelope of what it can do, what it has to ask about, and what it is forbidden to touch. If you cannot name the forbidden list, the agent will cross it. The first move with a zero is to write the forbidden list before you write anything else.

The bands

Add up the yeses. The total is zero to twenty-four.

• 0-8 — Founder is the company. Most of the work still routes through you. The first move is to name an owner for the one department you dread the most and write that department’s rules down this quarter.
• 9-16 — A roster forming. A few departments can be delegated; the rest are still founder-dependent. The scorecard’s lowest department is the next seat; one agent hire inside a quarter is realistic.
• 17-24 — It can run without you. You have most of the roster in place. The lowest-scoring department is still worth fixing, and the next question is whether the one person at the top is spending time on the right things.

How to answer honestly

Score the department as it is this week, not as you hope it will be this quarter. “Working on it” is a zero. “Written down and running” is a one. The scorecard is a mirror, not a plan; the plan comes from the lowest department.

“Score it. Fix the lowest one. Then the next.”

Why six departments and not twelve

Because every $5-50M business has these six and every one of them can be filled by an AI employee today. More departments would be more precise and less honest. Six is the number of seats you can keep in your head while you decide the next hire.

Score your company below and the drip will name the first seat.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I retake the scorecard?

Once a quarter is enough. The scorecard is a shape, not a dashboard. If you take it every week, you will see noise. If you take it every quarter, you will see the shape change.

What if two departments tie for lowest?

Pick the one you dread more. The lowest department is a tie-breaker; the department you avoid is the one that is actually blocking you.

Can I score it with my team?

Yes, and the answers will be more honest. If you do it alone, you will score too high on question 2 (your head is the owner) and too high on question 3 (you underestimate the loop you have already built).

Does a score of 24 mean I am done?

No. 24 means the recurring work is owned. The strategic work (new offers, new markets, new seasons) still belongs to the person at the top. The scorecard sets a floor, not a ceiling.