How the Assessment Works

The ACG assessment is designed to give senior leaders clarity before committing to change.

It provides a structured, evidence-based understanding of whether AI or automation should be introduced, where it may add value, and what conditions must be in place for it to succeed in practice.

The assessment is delivered as one engagement, for a single agreed fee, with a clear scope and defined outcomes.

Initial executive readiness call (complimentary)

Before you commission any formal assessment, ACG conducts an initial executive-level conversation, typically lasting 45–60 minutes.

This session serves several purposes:

to understand the organisation’s context, pressures, and objectives
to clarify what is driving interest in AI or automation
to identify any immediate constraints or misconceptions
to explain how the assessment works in practice

While this is not a diagnostic or advisory session, it provides senior leaders with early clarity on whether a full assessment is appropriate and what it would realistically involve.

For ACG, it ensures that the assessment — if undertaken — is relevant, properly scoped, and aligned with decision-makers.

This conversation is offered at no cost and forms part of ACG’s commitment to independent, decision-led advisory rather than transactional selling.

A structured, phased engagement

The assessment is delivered through two focused assessment sessions, followed by reporting and a formal debrief.

This structure allows complex organisational and technical considerations to be examined properly, with clear decision checkpoints, without overloading participants or collapsing important distinctions.

Session 1: Organisational, cultural & change readiness

The first session focuses on the organisation itself — not technology.

In practical terms, this assessment examines how leaders make decisions, how the organisation sponsors change, how it assigns accountability, how it manages risk, and how it communicates new ways of working.

We assess leadership alignment, governance clarity, decision ownership, internal communication, skills readiness, incentives, cultural norms around experimentation, tolerance for ambiguity, and historical patterns of change adoption.

These factors consistently determine whether AI initiatives gain traction or quietly fail — regardless of the quality of the technology involved.

This session typically involves senior leadership and is conducted through structured discussion rather than workshops or training.

Session 2: Technical & operational readiness

In this session, we analyse how work actually moves through the organisation. We map key workflows, decision points, handoffs, and dependencies across teams, systems, and data. We identify where effort concentrates, where delays occur, and where manual intervention creates friction, cost, or operational risk.

We examine how information is created, accessed, and acted upon; how decisions are triggered; and how exceptions are handled in practice rather than on paper. We assess data availability, system interoperability, process maturity, and governance constraints in the context of real operating conditions.

This session is explicitly informed by the findings of the organisational assessment. By understanding how leadership, accountability, communication, and change dynamics operate in reality, we evaluate operational opportunities through a lens that reflects how the business actually functions, not how it is assumed to function.

Where data is available, we quantify potential impact. We identify time, effort, and resource consumption within key workflows and translate those into indicative cost or capacity implications using known internal metrics or credible benchmarks. This allows us to distinguish between opportunities that could deliver meaningful operational return and those where expected gains are marginal, speculative, or outweighed by risk.

Using this evidence, we identify where AI or automation could realistically improve speed, consistency, quality, or scalability — and where it would add complexity, introduce risk, or fail to deliver sustainable value. Our focus is not on what could be automated in theory, but on what should be automated given how the organisation operates today.

Reporting and debrief

Following the assessment sessions, ACG produces a comprehensive Key Findings Report, typically running to several dozen pages.

The report documents:

organisational and adoption readiness
operational and technical opportunity
risks, constraints, and dependencies
prioritised recommendations and next steps

Where organisational factors materially affect technical viability, this is made explicit.

Several days after delivery, a formal debrief session is held to walk through the findings, explain implications, and answer questions.

This ensures leadership teams fully understand what the assessment means in practice.

Scope, fees, and what happens next

The assessment is offered as a single engagement, typically priced as starting from $4,500, and includes:

both assessment sessions
analysis and reporting
the Key Findings Report
the debrief and explanation session

There is no obligation to proceed beyond this point.

Additional work and next phases

In some cases, the assessment may identify preparatory work that should be addressed before technical recommendations can be implemented successfully. This may relate to governance, leadership alignment, decision ownership, communication, or adoption readiness.

Where this occurs:

the assessment is still completed in full
findings are not withheld
risks and trade-offs are clearly documented and explained

Any work beyond the assessment — including implementation support, preparatory change work, or ongoing advisory — is discussed separately, scoped explicitly, and subject to a separate agreement and negotiated fees.

Clients are under no obligation to engage ACG for any further work.

This separation is intentional. It ensures that assessment findings remain independent, credible, and focused on what is genuinely in the organisation’s best interest.

A note on intent

The purpose of the assessment is not to sell tools or implementation services.

It is to give leadership teams a clear, defensible understanding of:

what will work
what will not
what is conditional
and what should happen next

Only with that clarity can good decisions be made.