From McKinsey to BCG, from the EU to ISO, and from vendors and consulting firms worldwide, everyone has their own version of the AI Readiness Assessment. A quick search will turn up dozens of them, and they arrive in my feeds daily. Some are cursory and superficial, some granular and thoughtful. Some are a series of random questions, while others are carefully categorized into elements like strategy, data, technology, talent, governance, and culture. Some can be completed in an hour, while others require extensive preparation, discovery, and participation. They all have flaws common to these sorts of instruments: they are self-reported, self-scored, and self-interpreted. All pollsters know that self-reported data is inherently suspect. Pollsters and researchers have a name for what happens when people assess themselves without any external calibration: they call it bias, and it’s been studied exhaustively.