# The AI maturity assessment > Free AI maturity assessment for professional services firms: nine questions, two minutes, five pillars scored and a report in your inbox straight away. Source: https://www.assume-ai.com/ai-maturity-assessment An AI maturity assessment measures how far a firm has really got with AI, and shows where the next gains sit. The AssumeAI AI maturity assessment is free, built for professional services firms of 20 to 200 staff: nine questions, about two minutes, scored across five pillars and benchmarked against comparable firms, with your report in your inbox straight away. ## What is an AI maturity assessment? Most senior leaders cannot say where their firm actually stands on AI. Some staff use it every day, others not at all; there may be a licence or two, a policy in draft and a few ideas about where it could help. An AI maturity assessment turns that picture into a score, so a leadership team can see what is in place, what is missing, and what to do first. Our assessment looks at five pillars of a firm, because AI succeeds or stalls on all five rather than on the technology alone: Strategy and Leadership, Process and Workflow, Tooling and Infrastructure, People and Adoption, and Governance and Risk. It asks nine questions across them, takes about two minutes, and produces a scored report written for your firm. It is built for professional services firms of 20 to 200 staff: consultancies, accountancy practices, law firms and other firms that sell expertise by the hour or the project. Those are the firms we work with, so the questions are about the work they do, such as proposals, engagement letters, status reports and time capture, not about factory lines or call centres. [Take the AI maturity assessment](https://assess.assume-ai.com/ai-maturity). It is free. ## What are the nine questions? The questions are short and multiple choice, and each one is chosen because the answer changes what a firm should do next. They are grouped by pillar. - Strategy and Leadership: has your senior team identified the specific workflows where AI would most improve margin, and put numbers against them? - Strategy and Leadership: who owns AI decisions at your firm? - Strategy and Leadership: how does AI appear in this year's business plan? - Process and Workflow: which of these are still done substantially manually? Client intake and onboarding, engagement letters or scoping documents, proposals and RFP responses, meeting notes and follow ups, status and progress reports, time capture and billing preparation, and research and synthesis. - Process and Workflow: roughly what percentage of fee earner time goes to admin rather than billable or chargeable work? - Tooling and Infrastructure: have you rolled out an AI tool across the firm yet? - People and Adoption: what percentage of your staff use AI tools in their daily workflow? - People and Adoption: has the firm run formal AI training in the last 12 months? - Governance and Risk: do you have a written AI use policy covering client data confidentiality? None of them needs research before you answer. If you are a partner, director or operations lead, you will know the answers, or know that nobody does, which is itself an answer. ## How is the AI maturity score worked out? Each answer earns points, from nothing for the least mature answer to three for the most mature. The manual work question works the other way round: the fewer of those tasks are still done by hand, the higher the score. Points are added up within each pillar, and the pillars are combined into one score out of 100. Points in Process and Workflow count one and a half times as much as points anywhere else, because that is where automation lives and where most of the recoverable time sits. That weighting is in line with published research: McKinsey's State of AI survey tested 25 attributes and found that redesigning workflows had the biggest effect on whether organisations saw an impact on earnings from generative AI. The score shown is held between 15 and 85. A firm that answers every question at the floor still has people and a business to build on, so it is never told it scores zero, and nobody is handed a perfect 100, because there is always further to go. The score then places the firm in one of four tiers: - AI Curious (up to 35): early, which is the cheapest place to start, because the first wins are the biggest and the quickest to land. - AI Emerging (36 to 60): AI is already saving time in parts of the firm; the risk now is plateauing while competitors turn early wins into firm-wide gains. - AI Established (61 to 82): AI is real, but the value is uneven across the five pillars, and the unevenness is where the next gains sit. - AI Leading (83 and above): the top tier, where the job is to defend and extend the lead with more advanced workflows and a measurement story the partnership can stand behind. The tier names are deliberately a journey rather than a grade. Every tier names a real position and a clear next step, because the point of the assessment is to decide what to do, not to pass or fail. ## What does the AI maturity report show you? You see your score and tier on screen the moment you finish. The full report goes to your inbox straight away, and it has three layers. ### Your score and tier Your score out of 100, your tier and what that tier means for a firm like yours, with a benchmark line that gives an indication of where a score like yours sits among professional services firms of your size. ### Each pillar, in one word A one-word level for each of the five pillars: Absent, Emerging, Established or Embedded. It turns one number into specific gaps, so you can see which pillar is holding the firm back. ### Each answer, against the evidence A short section for each of your answers, saying whether you are ahead of the field or have a gap to close, with the industry research behind it, from sources such as McKinsey, Deloitte, Thomson Reuters, BCG and the Consultancy BenchPress report. Figures are labelled as industry benchmarks, never as measurements of your own firm. ## AI maturity assessment or AI readiness assessment? Many people search for this as an AI readiness assessment, and the two terms overlap. Both ask how prepared a firm is to get value from AI, and both usually look at leadership, data and processes, tools, skills and governance. The difference is in the question each one asks. A readiness assessment asks whether a firm is ready to start. A maturity assessment asks how far it has already got, which suits most professional services firms, because few are starting from nothing: staff often use AI tools whether or not the firm has chosen one. Our assessment scores that reality, including the parts nobody has signed off, such as personal licences and an AI policy still in draft. It also looks at who owns AI. One of the nine questions asks who makes AI decisions at your firm, because ownership is where many firms stall. In the same McKinsey survey, 28 percent of respondents whose organisations use AI said their chief executive was responsible for overseeing AI governance. If you need a fuller readiness assessment, with interviews and evidence rather than a self-assessment, it is one of the five documents in our [AI Strategy Review](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/ai-strategy-review). ## What should you do after the assessment? Start with the pillar that scored lowest: that is usually where the next gains sit, and often the cheapest to close. If Governance and Risk is the gap, a written policy (our free [AI policy template](https://www.assume-ai.com/resources/ai-policy-template) is a starting point) and an enterprise tier tool close most of it, and [AI Governance Implementation](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/ai-governance-implementation) does that in 2 to 4 weeks, from £3,000. If People and Adoption is the gap, [tailored AI team training](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/ai-team-training) starts from £5,000. If Strategy and Leadership is the gap, the [AI Priorities Workshop](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/ai-prioritisation-consultation), from £4,000, gives you two pain point workshops and a concise roadmap; the [AI Strategy Review](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/ai-strategy-review), from £12,000, goes deeper. If Process and Workflow is the gap and you already know the bottleneck, a [30-day implementation sprint](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/30-day-sprint), from £6,000, takes one use case and delivers a tangible change within a month. Or take it no further with us at all: the report is yours to act on however you like. To size the return before you spend anything, the [AI ROI calculator](https://www.assume-ai.com/ai-roi-calculator) sets the hours your team could save against the cost of the work. If you would like to talk it through, the [strategy call](https://www.assume-ai.com/book-now) is free. Every service has a published price, set out in full on our [pricing page](https://www.assume-ai.com/pricing): | Service | Timeline | Investment | | --- | --- | --- | | [AI Priorities Workshop](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/ai-prioritisation-consultation): Two pain point workshops and a concise roadmap | Two workshops, plus a roadmap | From £4,000 | | [AI Strategy Review](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/ai-strategy-review): Surveys, interviews, a tech stack review and five documents | About six weeks | From £12,000 | | [AI Governance Implementation](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/ai-governance-implementation): Policies, impact assessments and audit trails | 2 to 4 weeks | From £3,000 | | [Tailored AI Team Training](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/ai-team-training): Workshops across Claude, Cowork, Gemini and more | One-off or a sustained programme | From £5,000 | | [30-Day Implementation Sprint](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/30-day-sprint): One use case, built and deployed | About four weeks | From £6,000 | | [90-Day Implementation Sprint](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/90-day-sprint): Several workflows built, deployed and embedded | About twelve weeks | From £15,000 | | [Enterprise AI Deployment](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/enterprise-ai-deployment): Claude Cowork or ChatGPT Enterprise, with six to twelve agents and skills | Agreed when scoped | £20,000 ex VAT | | [Managed Service](https://www.assume-ai.com/services/managed-service): Half, one or two engineers embedded in your firm | Monthly | From £5,500 per month | ## Sources and further reading - McKinsey and Company, [The state of AI: How organizations are rewiring to capture value](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai-how-organizations-are-rewiring-to-capture-value), 2025. Source of the finding on workflow redesign (25 attributes tested) and the 28 percent figure on chief executive oversight of AI governance. - [AI for consultancies](https://www.assume-ai.com/ai-for-consultancies): where AI pays back first in a consulting firm. - [AI for professional services](https://www.assume-ai.com/ai-for-professional-services): AI strategy, governance and client data for professional services firms. - [The free AI governance template](https://www.assume-ai.com/resources#governance): an AI tool impact assessment to complete for each AI tool your firm uses. ## Questions ### Is the AI maturity assessment free? Yes. It is nine questions, takes about two minutes, and costs nothing. You see your score as soon as you finish, and the full scored report arrives in your inbox straight away. ### Is an AI maturity assessment the same as an AI readiness assessment? For most practical purposes, yes. Both ask how far a firm has got with AI and what is holding it back. We call ours an AI maturity assessment because it scores where you already are, across strategy, process, tooling, people and governance, rather than only whether you are ready to begin. ### What does the assessment measure? Five pillars: Strategy and Leadership, Process and Workflow, Tooling and Infrastructure, People and Adoption, and Governance and Risk. Each pillar gets its own one-word level (Absent, Emerging, Established or Embedded), and the firm as a whole gets a score out of 100 and one of four tiers: AI Curious, AI Emerging, AI Established or AI Leading. ### Who is it designed for? Professional services firms of 20 to 200 staff: consultancies, accountancy practices, law firms and other professional services businesses. Firms outside that range can still take it and still receive the report. ### What details do I need to give? To send the report, the assessment asks for your first name, email address, phone number, firm name, role, sector and headcount. Your surname is optional. There is also an optional box for anything else you would like us to know, which can shape the report. ### What happens after I finish? You see your score and tier on screen, with the option of booking a free 30-minute call with our team to talk through your score and the fastest wins for a firm in your position. There is no cost and no obligation. The report arrives by email either way. ### How is it different from an AI Strategy Review? The assessment is a two-minute self-assessment that tells you where you stand. The AI Strategy Review is a paid engagement of about six weeks, from £12,000, built on organisational surveys, stakeholder interviews and a review of your tech stack. It ends in five documents: an AI implementation roadmap, an AI risk assessment, a fuller AI readiness assessment, an AI audit report and an executive presentation.