The Confidence Standard · Secure AI Adoption
AI Is Already Inside.
Make It Deliberate.
Skyrocket Your AI: the readiness assessment that starts the practice.
Your people are already using it. Pilots are multiplying in 3 departments that don't know about each other, customer data is being pasted into tools nobody approved, and the AI licenses you're paying for sit largely unused. Blocking it pushes the same usage somewhere you can't see. Our approach gives you a scored picture of where you actually stand across 6 dimensions, closes the live exposure first, then sequences adoption in the order most likely to succeed. Same 4 stages as our cybersecurity practice. Same standard of care.
Also available for cybersecurity - Skyrocket Cyber Maturity→
4 stages. 4 named services. Each one feeds the next.
These are sequential stages, so company size doesn't decide where you enter. Everyone starts at Assess, because nothing downstream is trustworthy without it.
ASSESS
Skyrocket Your AI: AI Readiness Assessment
Score 6 dimensions. Discover shadow AI. Inventory the licenses.
4-6 WEEKS
PRIORITIZE
Quick-Win Sprint & Roadmap Activation
Close the live exposure. Publish a usable policy. Recover wasted license spend.
30 DAYS
IMPLEMENT
Secure AI Deployment Service
Secure-by-design builds, governed workspaces, and the adoption work behind them.
SCOPED PER ENGAGEMENT
OPERATE
Continuous AI Governance Program
Monitoring, model audits, compliance reporting, quarterly re-scores.
ONGOING
6 dimensions, one number, 5 tiers.
A score makes AI readiness arguable at board level. Each dimension is scored 0–100 on evidence, then rolled into an overall AI Readiness Score.
Strategy & Vision
The degree to which AI use is tied to business outcomes instead of individual enthusiasm.
Data Foundation
How findable, governed and reliable your data is to build on.
Process Readiness
The readiness of workflows AI would touch to be automated effectively.
Technology & Infrastructure
Your platform, integrations and controls being capable of supporting production AI.
People & Skills
Your teams’ ability to use, question and maintain what gets deployed.
Governance, Risk & Security
The presence of policy, oversight and controls before the exposure emerges.
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WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
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TYPICAL NEXT MOVE
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Nascent
0-19
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No strategy, no policy, no visibility. Whatever AI exists is shadow AI.
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Discovery and a usable AI use policy, before anything else.
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Developing
20-39
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Pilots running in pockets. Enthusiasm outpacing governance. Licenses bought, largely unused. | Quick-Win Sprint: policy, approved tools, license rationalization. |
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Operational
40-59
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Some AI in production with real users. Governance exists but isn't yet consistently applied. | Secure deployment of the next use cases, on a framework rather than ad hoc. |
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Advanced
60-79
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AI embedded in core workflows, with monitoring and defined ownership. | Continuous governance, model auditing, vendor risk, compliance reporting. |
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AI Forward
80-100
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Adoption is systematic. New capability is evaluated, governed and deployed as routine. | Maintain, re-score quarterly, and extend the method to new domains. |
What each stage actually does.
Skyrocket Your AI: AI Readiness Assessment
The front door, and the entry point that returns the most for every organization at any size. A structured, expert-led assessment scoring AI posture across 6 dimensions, with shadow AI discovery and a full license and tool inventory.
- Six-dimension scored posture, 0–100, mapped to five maturity tiers
- Shadow AI discovery — what is actually in use, ahead of policy
- AI licence and tool inventory, including what you pay for and nobody uses
- Executive walkthrough of every finding with a named consultant
- Top risks named: shadow AI, data leakage, compliance gaps, vendor risk
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What you walk away with The AI Posture Report: executive summary with score, 6-dimension posture map, dimension findings, top risks, 3–5 quick wins deliverable in 30 days, a 90/180/365-day roadmap, implementation opportunities sized by impact and effort, and an evidence appendix. Duration |
Quick-Win Sprint & Roadmap Activation
The 30-day bridge from findings to momentum. This closes the live exposure and produces visible wins inside the same month, which is what keeps an AI program funded past its first quarter.
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AI use policy and safe-use rollout
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Approved and prohibited tool lists, with shadow-AI guardrails
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Rationalization of AI licenses you already own, where recovered spend is a CFO-grade result
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Hands-on training for operations teams, in English and Spanish
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Facilitated executive outcomes session naming owners, outcomes and KPIs
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What you walk away with A sequenced 90/180/365-day roadmap with owners attached, a published AI use policy, and a rationalized license position you can take to finance. Duration |
Secure AI Deployment Service
Expert-led implementation matched to the roadmap, including the adoption work that determines whether any of it actually gets used.
- Governance framework selection and customization: NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, AI TRiSM, MITRE ATLAS
- Secure-by-design AI pipelines protecting data, models and ML supply chains
- Use-case validation and builds: document intelligence, workflow automation, retrieval systems, service assistants
- Governed AI workspaces connected to systems of record through structured integrations
- Adoption and change program: role-based provisioning, guardrails, coaching, measurement
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What you walk away with Working AI systems inside a governance framework your auditors recognize, plus the provisioning, guardrails and coaching that decide whether people use them. Duration |
Continuous AI Governance Program
Posture keeps improving after deployment, or it decays. This is the retained layer that keeps it moving and keeps the evidence current as regulation changes.
- Model performance monitoring and auditing
- Compliance reporting as regulations evolve: EU AI Act and sector guidance
- Vendor and model risk review
- Quarterly posture re-scores against your original baseline
- Retained advisory as new AI capability emerges
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What you walk away with A trend line. Progress is measured exactly the way the starting point was measured, so improvement arrives as evidence you can put in front of a board. Duration |
One methodology. Two engagement modes.
Hands-On
4-6 weeks | Consultant Led
The default. A consultant works with your people directly and presents findings to your leadership personally.
- Live interviews across business and technical teams
- Collaborative mapping of your actual environment
- Executive walkthrough of every finding
- Two follow-up sessions after delivery
- Optional continuous posture tracking
Digital
Continuous | Platform-delivered
A living score that re-scores as gaps close, suited to organizations that want the posture tracked rather than photographed.
- Platform-delivered scoring on the same six dimensions
- Re-scores automatically as evidence changes
- Lower-touch, continuous rather than point-in-time
- Upgrades into Hands-On at any point
Grounded in standards. Scored against evidence.
Designed to pass the conversations you'll have with auditors, examiners and your board: NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, MITRE ATLAS, AI TRiSM and the EU AI Act, with a SANS AI Security Maturity Model overlay where it helps.
Every new AI system is new data flows and new access patterns.
This is the part most AI vendors leave for someone else. We run both practices, so the security consequences of an AI decision get raised while the decision is still being made.
| WHEN THIS HAPPENS | THIS IS WHAT IT OPENS |
| An AI governance and policy programme stands up | vCISO · Policy Development |
| AI systems reach production | Penetration testing of AI-deployed systems |
| Data starts flowing into AI integrations | Data Protection · Compliance Readiness |
| The technology footprint expands | Skyrocket Cyber Maturity Assessment |
| AI operations mature | MDR · XDRaaS · SIEMaaS |
When this is the right first move, and when something else comes first.
Start here if...
- You suspect AI is in use across the business but can't say where, by whom, or with what data.
- A board, a regulator, a client or an insurer has started asking about your AI governance.
- You are paying for AI licenses and can't demonstrate what they returned.
- Pilots keep starting and nothing reaches production.
- You operate in a regulated sector where the EU AI Act or sector guidance is becoming relevant.
Something else first, if...
- You are in an active security incident. Emergency response, 24/7. AI governance waits.
- Your core security program has never been benchmarked. Run Skyrocket Cyber Maturity first or in parallel. AI governance sitting on an ungoverned estate is decoration.
- You have one contained pilot and no wider usage. You may only need the policy and the guardrails. Say so on the call and we'll scope it that way.
- Your data foundation is the known blocker. That's a data engineering problem before it is an AI readiness problem, and we'll tell you so.
Straight answers, before the call.
What is shadow AI, and why does it matter?
Shadow AI is the AI already being used inside your organization without approval, visibility or policy, staff pasting customer data into consumer chatbots, teams standing up pilots on personal accounts, plugins connected to systems of record by someone who meant well. It matters because the exposure is live now and unmeasured: data leaves, decisions get made on outputs nobody validated, and the first time most organizations discover the scale of it is during an audit. Discovery of shadow AI is built into the readiness assessment.
What is an AI Readiness Score?
A 0–100 score across 6 dimensions, Strategy & Vision, Data Foundation, Process Readiness, Technology & Infrastructure, People & Skills, and Governance, Risk & Security, rolled into one overall figure and mapped to 5 maturity tiers: Nascent (0–19), Developing (20–39), Operational (40–59), Advanced (60–79) and AI Forward (80–100). Governance is weighted more heavily for regulated institutions, because that's how examiners weigh it too.
How is this different from an AI questionnaire or an online readiness quiz?
It is evidence-based and practitioner-delivered, not a report a language model produces from a web form. Findings come from live interviews, collaborative mapping of your actual environment, and discovery of what is genuinely in use, then get walked through with your leadership by the consultant who produced them. A questionnaire records what you believe about yourself. Most organizations rate themselves higher than the evidence supports, and that gap is usually where the surprises live.
Are you going to tell us to stop using AI?
No. AI doesn't need to be stopped; it needs to be steered. Blocking drives the usage underground, where you can't measure it. The work is to make safe adoption easier than unsafe adoption, approved tools that are genuinely good, a policy people can follow, and guardrails on the paths that carry real risk.
Which standards do you work to?
NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, MITRE ATLAS, AI TRiSM and the EU AI Act, with a SANS AI Security Maturity Model overlay where useful. Grounded in standards, scored against evidence, and designed to pass the conversations you will have with auditors, examiners and your board.
How does this relate to Skyrocket for cybersecurity?
Same method, different subject. Both run the 4 Skyrocket stages (Assess, Prioritize, Implement, Operate) and both produce a score, a ranked gap list and a sequenced roadmap. Skyrocket Cyber Maturity benchmarks your security program against NIST CSF over 8 weeks; Skyrocket Your AI scores AI readiness across 6 dimensions. Many organizations run both, and each one makes the other cheaper. Every new AI system creates new data flows and access patterns that the cyber side then has to cover.
Do we have to buy the later stages?
No. The AI Posture Report, the score and the roadmap are yours, written to be executable by your own team or any third party. Follow-on work is scoped and priced individually against specific findings in your roadmap. We never propose it from a catalog.
Pick the one that matches how ready you are.
Score yourself first
5 questions, an immediate indicative score and tier. 5 self-reported answers give you a rough position, and the full assessment scores the same 6 dimensions against evidence.
Read a sample AI Posture Report
The actual deliverable: score, 6-dimension posture map, top risks, quick wins and the 90/180/365-day roadmap. The fastest way to judge whether the output is worth the engagement.
Book a discovery call
We establish scope, confirm which stage you should actually start at, and give you a price. If the honest answer is “not yet,” we will say that.
AI is already inside. Make the next 30 days deliberate.
Start with a scored picture of where you stand. Close the live exposure in the first 30 days. Then sequence adoption in the order most likely to succeed.