AI Enablement Maturity Model
Nearly every AI enablement program stalls in the same place, and it isn't training and it isn't tooling. Good practice gets written down but never circulates — it sits where the people doing that kind of work never encounter it. This is the five-stage model that names the stall, and a twelve-question assessment that tells you where you are.
12 questions · about three minutes · no sign-up, no email to see your result
The model
Every organisation using AI is somewhere on this ladder. The rungs are not about how much AI you use — they are about whether what works reaches the people who need it.
People use AI. Nobody knows who, for what, or how well. There is no shared practice — every useful thing anyone works out stays with the person who worked it out, and disappears when they move on.
There is enthusiasm, some training, maybe a licence rollout and a channel. Access is no longer the constraint. But everyone invents their own approach, so the same task gets done a dozen different ways and the good versions are indistinguishable from the rest.
Good practice has been written down — in a doc, a wiki, a pinned message, a slide. You have done the hard part, and you can feel that it still isn't landing. That feeling is the circulation gap: what's recorded sits where the people doing that kind of work never open it. Most of it is never read again.
◂ The most common place to be stuckWhat's proven reaches the people doing that kind of work, wherever they sit on the org chart. Material written by one person gets picked up and used by people who didn't write it — not because they were told to, but because it reached them at the moment they needed it.
You can show where standard practice has landed, where it hasn't, and that it spread on its own rather than because you pushed it. When leadership asks whether the program is working, you answer with a map instead of a feeling.
The stall
The jump from stage 3 to stage 4 is where almost every program stops, and it is a different kind of problem from the ones before it. Stages 1 and 2 are about use — getting AI into people's hands. Most enablement effort goes here, and it works.
But once good practice exists and is written down, the constraint quietly changes. The question is no longer whether people can use AI. It is whether the person who just worked out the best way to draft an incident statement ever reaches the forty other people who draft incident statements — who sit in four different departments and will never open the wiki page it was filed under.
That is the circulation gap. Closing it is not more training and not another tool licence. It is making proven practice travel to the people who do that kind of work, and being able to show that it did.
What the assessment measures
The assessment scores you on six things. Four of them describe what happens after good practice exists — which is where the circulation gap lives.
Is AI being used, and do you know by whom?
FoundationalDoes the same kind of work get done the same way?
FoundationalDoes good practice get recorded when it happens?
FoundationalDoes what's recorded reach others doing that work?
The circulation gapIs the program self-sustaining, or does it depend on you?
Self-sustaining loopCan you show leadership what actually happened?
Coverage by work typeThe assessment
Twelve questions, answered honestly by whoever runs the program. You'll get your stage, a breakdown across all six dimensions, and the single most useful thing to do next — on screen, with no sign-up and no email.