Assessment Methodology

Absolute Scoring

Absolute scoring, not relative ranking

Every assessment uses absolute scoring: your score reflects the statements you selected against a fixed maximum, not a ranking against other organisations that have taken the assessment. This means your result is stable and comparable over time, and improving your organisation’s practices will improve your score regardless of how any other organisation performs.

Assessment Engine

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One shared assessment engine, tailored content

All 20-plus assessments in the INTAI Assessment Suite™ run on the same underlying engine: the same statement-based format, the same domain-and-scoring structure, and the same seven-level maturity scale. What differs between assessments is the subject-specific content, meaning the domains, statements, report commentary and recommendations are written and reviewed separately for each topic, from AI readiness to AI governance to executive maturity.

Board AI Readiness (Lead AI)

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Board AI Readiness Assessment

Part of the Lead AI pathway, this assessment measures whether a board has the understanding, information flow and oversight structures needed to govern AI-related decisions and risk at board level, distinct from operational or executive management.

Confidence Labels

Confidence labels behind each maturity level

Internally, each maturity level is associated with a short confidence label, for example ranging from an early-stage label through to a highly assured label, which is used to keep the language in your report consistent and proportionate to your actual score, rather than overstating or understating your current position.

Department AI Readiness (Lead AI)

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Department AI Readiness Assessment

Part of the Lead AI pathway, this assessment measures whether a specific department, function or business unit is ready to adopt and use AI responsibly, taking into account its own workflows, data and risk profile rather than the organisation as a whole.

Design Principles

Why we use statements instead of multiple-choice questions

Multiple-choice questions often force organisations into an answer that does not quite fit their situation. Instead, each INTAI assessment presents a series of clear, practical statements, and you select every statement that currently and accurately applies. This produces a more honest picture of a genuinely mixed or partial position, since you are not forced to round up or down to the nearest available option.

Discover AI Pathway

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The Discover AI pathway

Discover AI is the first of four pathways in the INTAI Assessment Suite™, made up of the AI Readiness, AI Opportunity, AI Use Case, AI Literacy, AI Skills and AI Training Needs assessments. It is designed for organisations that are exploring where and how AI could be used, before or alongside early adoption, focusing on organisational, workforce and use-case readiness.

Domain Structure

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Domains, not a single undifferentiated score

Every assessment is broken down into a small number of equally weighted domains rather than producing one flat number. For example, the AI Governance Assessment uses six domains: governance direction and accountability, risk-based governance decisions, policy, law and governance evidence, responsible use and human oversight, lifecycle control and monitoring, and assurance, reporting and improvement. Showing a score per domain lets you see exactly where your organisation is strong and where it needs attention, rather than a single number that could hide either extreme.

Embed AI Pathway

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The Embed AI pathway

Embed AI is the second pathway, made up of the AI Adoption, ChatGPT Readiness, Microsoft Copilot Readiness and Prompt Engineering assessments. It focuses on whether AI is moving from pilot or experimentation into genuine, supported, everyday use, including tool-specific considerations for widely used platforms.

Equal Domain Weighting

Why domains are weighted equally

Within a given assessment, each domain typically carries the same maximum score, for example ten points each across six domains for a sixty-point total. We weight domains equally by default because governance, risk, oversight and operational domains are each capable of causing serious harm on their own if neglected; a strong score in one area is not treated as compensating for a weak score in another.

Executive Commentary Generation

How executive commentary is generated

The short block of executive commentary included in most reports is generated from your overall score, maturity level and domain pattern, using pre-written commentary calibrated to that combination of results. It is designed to summarise your position in plain business language suitable for sharing with senior leadership, and sits alongside, rather than instead of, your detailed domain scores.

Free-Text Fields

Free-text and contextual fields

A small number of assessments ask for brief contextual information beyond the core statements, for example your organisation’s sector or current AI adoption stage. This context is used only to make the commentary and recommendations in your report more relevant, and does not itself contribute to your numeric score.

Govern AI Pathway

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The Govern AI pathway

Govern AI is the third pathway and the largest, made up of the AI Governance, AI Risk, AI Risk Classification, AI Policy, AI Data Readiness, AI Vendor and AI Assurance assessments. It focuses specifically on the controls, accountability, evidence and oversight needed to govern AI responsibly once it is in meaningful use.

Index Score

What the index score represents

Each assessment produces a named index, for example the AI Governance Index™ or AI Readiness Index™, calculated as the sum of your domain scores against the assessment’s maximum possible score. The index gives you a single reference number for tracking change over time, while the domain breakdown behind it gives you the detail needed to act.

Lead AI Pathway

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The Lead AI pathway

Lead AI is the fourth pathway, made up of the Executive AI Maturity, Board AI Readiness, Department AI Readiness and AI Agents Readiness assessments. It is written specifically from a leadership and oversight perspective, for executives, boards and department leads rather than operational teams.

Lifecycle Coverage

Why domains often span the whole AI lifecycle

Where an assessment covers governance or risk, its domains are typically structured to follow the lifecycle of an AI system rather than a single moment in time, covering direction and accountability, approval and decision-making, policy and evidence, responsible use and oversight, ongoing monitoring, and assurance and improvement. This reflects our view that governance which stops at initial approval, and does not continue through live use, change and retirement, leaves a significant gap.

Maturity Scale

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The seven-level maturity scale

Every assessment maps your overall index score onto the same seven-level maturity scale: an early, largely unstructured stage; an emerging stage with some inconsistent activity; a developing stage with real but incomplete foundations; a controlled stage with core controls in place but variable consistency; a governed stage with clear accountability and regular oversight; an advanced stage with mature, well-integrated controls; and an assured stage demonstrating enterprise-level maturity. Each level in your report includes a plain-language summary and a proportionate recommendation for what to focus on next.

Navigation And Progress

How the assessment is structured page by page

Statements are grouped into pages that respect domain boundaries, so you complete one topic area at a time rather than jumping between unrelated subjects. A progress indicator shows which page you are on, how many questions remain, and what percentage of the assessment is complete, and your answers are saved as you move between pages within the same session.

PDF And Email Delivery

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How your report is generated and delivered

Once you complete the final page, your responses are used to generate your report immediately within the browser. From the results page, you can download a PDF version of your report for your own records, or have a copy emailed to you or a colleague; both use the same underlying report content, generated specifically from your answers.

Priorities And Strengths

How priority gaps and strengths are identified

Alongside your domain scores, your report highlights your strongest existing foundations and your priority gaps, identified from which domains scored comparatively higher or lower relative to their maximum. This is designed to focus your attention on the handful of areas most worth addressing first, rather than presenting an undifferentiated list of every statement you did not select.

Question Bank Design

How statements are written and reviewed

Statements are written in plain, practical business language, describing an observable practice or control rather than an abstract principle, so that most people completing an assessment on behalf of their organisation can answer confidently without needing specialist technical or legal knowledge. Statement content is informed by recognised frameworks, including ISO/IEC 42001, ISO/IEC 27001, the NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act and UK data protection law, and is reviewed periodically as those frameworks and our own understanding evolve.

Recommendations And Roadmap

The roadmap included in your report

Many reports include a practical, short-term roadmap, often expressed across a first, second and third month, setting out concrete actions in rough priority order. This is intended as a realistic starting plan rather than an exhaustive project plan, and organisations often use it as the basis for a conversation with their leadership team or with INTAI about next steps.

Relationship To Formal Certification

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How this methodology relates to formal certification schemes

INTAI assessments are informed by the themes within ISO/IEC 42001, ISO/IEC 27001, Cyber Essentials, the EU AI Act and the NIST AI RMF, and can be a useful, low-friction way to gauge readiness before pursuing formal certification. They are not equivalent to, and do not replace, certification by an accredited independent certification body, which involves a formal audit against the full requirements of the relevant standard. INTAI itself is currently working toward ISO/IEC 42001, ISO/IEC 27001 and Cyber Essentials, rather than already holding them, and we describe our own status accordingly wherever it is mentioned on this website.

Report Structure

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What a typical report contains, end to end

A typical report opens with your overall index score and maturity level, followed by a domain-by-domain breakdown, executive commentary summarising your position, your strongest foundations, your priority gaps, specific recommendations, and, for many assessments, a short-term roadmap. This structure is consistent across the suite so that reports from different assessments are easy to read together.

Scoring Formula

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The scoring formula in plain terms

Each statement you select contributes a fixed weight, typically one point, toward the maximum score of the domain it belongs to. Domain scores are totalled to produce your overall index score out of the assessment’s maximum, commonly sixty points across six ten-point domains. That total is then compared against the maturity scale’s score ranges to determine your maturity level.

Statement Selection Format

Select every statement that applies

The core interaction throughout every assessment is the same: read each statement and select it only if it currently and accurately describes your organisation. There is no partial credit for a statement that is only somewhat true; if a statement is not yet fully accurate, it is more useful, and more honest, to leave it unticked and let your report reflect the genuine gap.

Suite-Wide Consistency

Why every assessment looks and scores the same way

We deliberately keep the format, scoring logic and maturity scale consistent across the entire INTAI Assessment Suite™, rather than inventing a new structure for every topic. This means that once you understand how one assessment works, you understand how they all work, and results from different assessments remain broadly comparable in structure even though their subject matter differs.

Time Estimates

How the time estimate for each assessment is set

The estimated completion time shown before each assessment, typically five to seven minutes, is based on the number of statements and pages in that specific assessment and reflects a realistic average completion time. Actual time will vary depending on how carefully you review each statement and how quickly you can assess whether it applies.

Updates To Assessment Content

How and when assessment content is updated

Assessment content packages, including statements, domains and report commentary, are version-controlled and reviewed periodically to reflect developments in AI governance practice, regulation and our own client experience. Where a meaningful update is made to an assessment, its version number changes so that results generated under an earlier version can still be understood in context.

Use Of Results Internally

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How organisations typically use their results

Most organisations use their report as a starting point for an internal conversation, for example presenting domain scores and priority gaps to a leadership team, using the roadmap to plan near-term actions, or comparing results across departments that completed the same assessment separately. Some organisations also retake an assessment periodically to track whether specific changes have moved the needle in a particular domain.

Weighting Exceptions

Are any statements ever weighted differently?

By default, every statement within a domain carries the same weight, so no single statement can dominate your result. Where an assessment’s content package assigns a different weight to a specific statement, this is a deliberate, documented design choice for that assessment, reflecting a statement judged to have materially greater significance, rather than the general rule across the suite.

Why Six Domains, Usually

Why most assessments use six domains

Six domains, each worth ten points toward a sixty-point maximum, has proven to be a practical balance for most topics in the suite: enough domains to meaningfully separate distinct areas of practice, such as accountability, decision-making and oversight, without so many that the report becomes difficult to read or act on. A small number of assessments use a different domain count where the subject matter genuinely calls for it.

AI Agents Readiness (Lead AI)

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AI Agents Readiness Assessment

Part of the Lead AI pathway, this assessment measures organisational readiness for autonomous or semi-autonomous AI agents specifically, including whether decision rights, oversight, escalation and control mechanisms exist for AI systems that can plan and take action with limited human involvement.