How ready is your firm

AI readiness tends to sit somewhere along a scale. A firm may have a few people who use AI every day and know its limits well, a partner who has raised it at a planning meeting, and a Copilot licence or two already paid for.

In many firms, the people using AI every day picked up that know-how on their own initiative, and the firm can build on it. A readiness check shows where each part sits.

1What AI readiness covers

AI readiness is how prepared a firm is to use AI well as a whole firm. For this article, we look at it across six areas.

1. The tools. Which AI tools are people using?

2. The work. What are they using them for?

3. The policy. What has the firm agreed about AI, in writing?

4. The training. How do people learn the tools, and who has been trained?

5. The systems. Which tools has the firm checked, and what is allowed into them?

6. The budget. What time and money has the firm set aside for AI?

The first two are the ground covered by an AI audit. The National AI Centre's Guidance for AI Adoption, written for "businesses and organisations in the early stages of adopting AI", covers policy, training and accountability. Its first steps include assigning "a senior leader as the overall AI governance owner", creating an AI policy, training the people accountable for AI, and keeping an AI register to "document all your AI systems, how you use them".

2What the research says about preparedness

Hays, a recruitment firm, surveyed more than 7,000 professionals and hiring managers in Australia and New Zealand for its Salary Guide between February and early March 2026. Of those surveyed, 60% use AI regularly at work, and Hays reports that 78% of Australians using AI at work lack formal training from their employer.

In a vendor survey for Cornerstone, run by YouGov in December 2025, 96% of HR leaders in Australia and New Zealand said they were confident in their organisation's AI readiness, and fewer than half of employees agreed.

On the employer side, the Australian HR Institute found in its December quarter 2025 outlook that 68% of workplaces had formal AI policies or guidelines and 24% had none. Among small organisations, 56% had a policy or guidelines. These are the views of more than 600 senior HR professionals and business leaders.

In law, LexisNexis surveyed 1,037 Australian legal practitioners for its 2025-26 Australian Legal AI Survey, a vendor survey. Asked what had been done to implement generative AI, 36.4% named training staff to use AI tools safely and 32.0% named creating a policy for internal use. Clio's 2026 Legal Insights Report, also a vendor survey, found 98% of the 533 Australian legal professionals it surveyed use AI, and 39% have embedded it in their daily workflows.

What we tend to see is that when people take up AI faster than the firm's policy, training and checks can follow, each person fills the gaps in their own way.

3Where the six areas meet

Writing a policy means knowing which tools it covers, and training people means having a policy to teach from.

In the 2025 Victorian Lawyer Census, the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner asked 1,674 lawyers about AI guidelines at work: 42% said their workplace had them, 45% said it had not, and 13% were unsure.

Thomson Reuters' 2026 Future of Professionals research, a global vendor survey, found a third of lawyers, accountants and compliance professionals use AI their organisation has not approved. Our post on shadow AI looks at how to find them without making the people using them feel caught out.

The Law Society of NSW's guide to responsible use of AI says law practice principals should "have policies and procedures in place for the appropriate use and supervision of generative AI". It suggests firms research the "vendors and tools available" and consider a full contract review. The Tax Practitioners Board's July 2026 guidance says tax practitioners are "ultimately responsible for exercising due diligence when using AI tools", including "appropriate review of commercial and internally developed or modified AI tools". It also says entering client information into an AI tool can count as passing it to a third party, which needs the client's permission, depending on how the tool is configured and used.

A budget for AI covers time as well as money. Training takes people away from client work, a policy needs a person to write it and keep it current, and checking a tool takes time from the people who look after the firm's IT. In the Reserve Bank's liaison survey of 105 medium to large firms, run in mid-2025, firms expected investment in AI to be "much higher over the next three years", and named barriers including "a lack of digital readiness, uncertainty about use cases and return on investment".

4Levels of AI readiness

An AI maturity model sets readiness out as levels. The Australian Responsible AI Index, run by Fifth Quadrant with the National AI Centre, is one example. It scores an organisation's responsible AI practices out of 100 and places it in one of four levels. Of the 241 organisations that completed its self-assessment tool, 31% sat at the lowest level and 21% at the highest, with an average score of 44. The organisations chose to take the test, so the spread may lean towards the more engaged end.

Our readiness check uses a separate four-level scale, built for the six areas in this article.

• Individual. The answers sit with the people using the tools, and can differ from desk to desk.

• Partly recorded. Some answers are written down, often a list of tools or a first draft of a policy.

• Shared. The answers are agreed, written down and available to the whole firm.

• Maintained. A named person keeps the answers current, and the firm reviews them on a regular cycle.

A firm can sit at one level for its policy and another for its budget, and each area can move up on its own.

5A readiness self-assessment

For each question below, place your firm on the scale above: individual, partly recorded, shared or maintained.

1. The tools. Could the firm list the AI tools in use today, including free versions, personal accounts and AI features switched on inside software it already has?

2. The work. For each tool, is it clear what work it is used for, and whether it holds client information?

3. The policy. Is there a written position on AI that people have read, covering the approved tools and what stays out of them? The National AI Centre publishes a free AI policy guide and template, and A policy that says yes looks at what a draft can contain before the partners finalise it.

4. The training. Does every person, from reception to the partners, start from the same foundation, with more for the teams that need it? AI training for the whole firm sets out the levels.

5. The systems. Has each approved tool been checked for how it handles the firm's data, with the firm's IT provider or IT team where that helps?

6. The budget. Is there time and money set aside for AI this year, for training, for checking tools, for AI subscriptions and for the person responsible for it?

Behind all six sits one more question: who in the firm looks after the answers. The National AI Centre's first practice is "Decide who is accountable", and whose job AI is looks at how firms can settle it.

Running the questions with people from different roles can reveal where their answers differ.

6Writing it down

Writing the answers down gives the firm a reference point for onboarding, client questions, tool approvals and training.

7Where we come in

We work through the same six areas with your firm in the investigation. A survey of every person in the firm, and interviews across teams, show which tools are in use, for what work, and how confident people feel with them. A session with the firm's IT provider looks at the systems, and the investigation produces a draft AI use policy, which your partners finalise. It also measures how long the firm's work takes today, so the firm starts from a baseline of its own. The findings belong to your firm whether or not we go any further together.

From there, the AI Uplift Implementation Plan sets out for leadership what to do next, and in what order.

To see how ready your firm is, talk to us. The first conversation works out whether your firm is the right fit for the AI Uplift Program, and whether we are the right people to help.

Checking your firm's AI readiness