The AI Readiness Checklist: Your Gift Guide to 2026 AI

How to guarantee AI won't be your New Year's Resolution that fails by February. Eight quick but critical questions to answer before deployment.

When the holiday season is over and the budgets are refreshed, it's akin to an annual tradition for your CEO to come back from a conference with big AI ideas.

"CEOs come back after seeing a new AI tool and say, 'hey, I want to do this. I want to integrate it into our organization, and I want us to get more profitable because of it,'" says Marc Devoe, VP of Strategic Accounts at Baseline IT Consulting. "But the challenge is they're putting the cart before the horse."

Before you sign another AI vendor contract in Q1, ask yourself: Is your organization actually ready?

The Foundation Question

Marc puts it bluntly: "They should be asking: 'How can you help me make sure my data is ready for AI?' You must evaluate everything that touches cyber, data, AI, and cloud."

Here's your AI readiness checklist—eight quick but critical questions to answer before deployment:

1. Do You Know What Data You Have?

"There is a lot of discussion about specific costs of a project. That's very tough to figure out sometimes without knowing what you actually have in terms of data," explains Andrew Gristina, our VP of Strategic Accounts.

You can't feed AI what you can't find. Start with data visibility—know what you have, where it lives, and who can access it.

2. Is Your Data Clean and Organized?

Marc's assessment: "I haven't seen one client yet with mature data practices where data scientists know where everything is, have it all clean. Everybody has this challenge right now."

If your data is messy, your AI outputs will be messier. No shortcuts here, and prepping your data first will save you time (and money) in the long run.

3. Do You Have Governance Frameworks in Place?

"If you have to prove you have good governance practices, you probably don't have good governance practices," Marc says. "It's not about having to prove it, it's about having to report—a moment to show 'here's where we are in our journey.'"

AI governance, data governance, and cyber governance must work together. Build the frameworks first so you never expand without structuring around governance.

4. What Business Problem Are You Actually Solving?

"What they're trying to do is build the plane while it's flying," Marc observes. "What they need to do is take a second to get their strategy together."

"We need AI" isn't a strategy. "We need to reduce customer churn by 15%" is a strategy. AI is the how, not the why.

5. What's the ROI Timeline—Really?

Andrew breaks down AI's actual capabilities: "CEOs think AI can do anything thought-wise that a person can do. That's not true. But there are things that AI can do that people can't do, period—like looking through terabytes of data in inconceivable time."

Set realistic expectations. Most AI implementations take 9-18 months to show meaningful ROI, not the 3 months vendors promise. This time is necessary to deploying an AI that actually assists your employees.

6. Do You Have AI Governance Policies Ready?

Critical questions to answer: Who approves AI decisions? How do we audit AI actions? What happens when AI gets it wrong?

Marc's recommendation: Build governance frameworks now. "Governance is a journey because you can't add all the practices at once. It's crawl, walk, run."

7. Can Your Team Actually Maintain This?

AI isn't "set it and forget it." Andrew explains the right approach in an example of ticket triage: "AI is really great at gathering all the data around a ticket and then suggesting a plan. It's an exciting opportunity to combine a person with this tech so they don't have to gather all the data—they can decide if the summary makes sense and then choose to execute."

You need ongoing model training, data pipeline maintenance, and integration support. Budget for it.

8. Have You Talked to a Vendor-Agnostic Consultant First?

Marc's approach: "We're the detectives. We look at what you have, line you up with the right vendors, and bring the right resources into the room."

Get an unbiased assessment before you sign contracts. Vendors sell products. Consultants solve problems.

The Bottom Line

Marc's final advice for 2026: "Once you get the data in an organized space, once you have your governance frameworks, the large learning models and all of those things are going to be much easier."

Stop building the plane while flying it. Your competitors rushing into AI without foundations? They're the 95% that fail.

Be the 5% that succeeds. Build your foundation first.

Ready to assess your AI readiness? Baseline offers vendor-agnostic AI readiness assessments that diagnose before we prescribe.