Score Your Firm's AI Readiness Before You Build the Plan

Most firms think they know where they stand with AI. The reality inside the firm is usually messier, and that gap is exactly where adoption plans stall.

This week, Kenton Grant and I went live with the first of two sessions leading up to our workshop at Autodesk University 2026. The goal is simple: help you show up ready to build an AI adoption plan for your firm, instead of walking in cold and guessing.

We're releasing the first exercise now so you have time to sit with it, ask questions inside your firm, and do some honest introspection before September.

The perception-versus-reality problem

There's the marketing version of your firm: "We're innovative, we're doing AI, we're high-tech." Then there's the internal reality: a few Grasshopper scripts that died on a server somewhere, someone who tried Midjourney a few times and moved on, and a handful of people wiring up custom workflows on nights and weekends.

Both are true. That's the point. Different people in different roles will score your firm differently, and the conversation about why is where the real work starts.

The Digital Practice OS

To make that conversation possible, we built a framework we're calling the Digital Practice OS. Three categories, broken into nine dimensions you can actually score yourself on:

Capability: what is your firm able to do today?

• Tool maturity (are your tools integrated and talking to each other?)
• Data quality (are you passing the right information between them?)
• AI literacy (how well is your staff versed in the concepts?)

Alignment: is the firm pulling in the same direction?

• Leadership alignment and advocacy
• Psychological safety and culture
• Ethics, governance, and readiness

Accountability: are you measuring what matters?

• Innovation metrics
• Feedback loops
• Business impact tracking

These aren't independent. Leadership alignment shapes what you can experiment with. Culture shapes whether people admit something isn't working. Ethics and governance depend on whether leadership will back the due diligence. It's a system, and it behaves like one.

It's not a good-or-bad test

This is the part people get wrong. A low score on AI literacy paired with high tool maturity isn't failure. It's information. The scorecard isn't there to make you feel behind. It's there to give you an honest snapshot of where you actually are, so you can build a plan that fits your firm instead of someone else's highlight reel.

Nine questions, scored one to five. It won't take long, but the point is to take your time and be real about it. Better yet, run it past a few people in different roles and see where your perceptions diverge. That divergence is usually the most useful thing you'll learn.

What to do next

Watch the replay of Session 1. We walk through the full framework and the self-assessment behind it.

Register for Session 2 (next week). We'll lead you through real-world scenarios, showing what this looks like for firms sitting at different readiness levels. Registering gets it on your calendar and gets you the replay if you can't make it live.

Bookmark our AU 2026 session. "Build Your Firm's AI Adoption Plan in 90 Minutes" (AS1719). This is where you'll actually run the exercises with the room, so show up with your readiness scores in hand. Seats are first-come, first-served.

If you're a firm leader, a BIM or design technologist, or the person trying to get AI off the ground where you work, this series is for you. Come do the work with us.