The technology audit
It scores your data, your cloud and your tools. It says nothing about who has to lead the change.
Your infrastructure is ready. Your leaders aren't.
Most AI readiness checks score your data and your tools. This one scores the people who have to lead the change: your leaders, your talent processes and your performance system.
Built on Rewired Leadership, the book by Mark Zides.
Book the assessment
Tell us about your leadership team.
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The problem
Your board wants to know if the company is ready for AI. The honest answer depends on your leaders.
The licenses are signed. The pilots are running. The data team has done its part.
What nobody has measured is whether the people in charge can lead the way the work now runs.
That gap doesn't show up in a technology audit. It shows up in slower decisions, stalled pilots and good people leaving.
- 99%
- of leaders believe AI will disrupt their industry.Source: Korn Ferry Institute
- 11%
- of talent leaders say their executives are well prepared to lead through the AI transition.Source: Korn Ferry, Talent Acquisition Trends 2026
- 5%
- of HR teams feel fully prepared to implement AI effectively.Source: Korn Ferry, 2025 CHRO survey
Why the usual checks miss it
Three ways companies try to answer the question. None of them looks at the leaders.
The engagement survey
People tell you what they think you want to hear. It measures mood, not readiness.
The training dashboard
Completion rates measure attendance. They can't tell you whether anyone leads differently.
Ask yourself
Three questions about your own leadership team. Answer them honestly.
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Q1
Are your leaders making decisions faster since AI arrived, or sending more of them upward?
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Q2
Do your talent processes know which work AI is taking over, and which work it's creating?
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Q3
Does your performance system reward the job people do now, or the one they had three years ago?
If you hesitated on any of them, that's where the assessment starts.
What we score
Three things decide whether AI lands. None of them is a data pipeline.
Leadership
How decisions move, where leaders are over-involved, and how your top team is likely to respond as AI changes their work.
From the book · The Four Types of Leaders AI Will Expose
Talent processes
Which work should be automated, which augmented, and which kept for human judgment. Whether hiring, development and succession reflect that.
From the book · The Judgment Audit
Performance management
What your system actually rewards, how fast delegated decisions get made, and whether leaders let those decisions stand.
From the book · The Zides Scorecard
The book behind the assessment
AI will not replace leaders. It will expose them.
Rewired Leadership is Mark Zides' playbook for leading when AI changes everything. The assessment applies its model to your company, so the findings come with a way forward, not just a score.
“If you’re a leader, talent strategist, or HR executive staring down the barrel of the AI revolution, Rewired Leadership is the wake-up call you didn’t know you needed.”
Of The Day Press · 2026 · Foreword by Michael Glass
How it works
Quick by design. Four weeks from kickoff to readout.
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Week 1
Kickoff
A working session with the CEO and CHRO to agree the scope and who takes part.
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Weeks 1 to 2
Conversations
Mark sits down one to one with each member of the top team. A short survey goes to the next layer of leaders.
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Week 3
Scoring
Findings are scored against the Rewired Leadership model: leadership, talent processes and performance management.
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Week 4
Readout
A working session with the executive team: the score, the story behind it, and the first moves.
The readout
What you get back.
Something your board can read in ten minutes, and your leadership team can act on the next morning.
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A readiness score
Leadership, talent processes and performance management, each scored and explained in plain language.
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A profile of your top team
How each leader is likely to respond as AI changes their work, using the four leader types from the book.
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The first 90 days
The moves to make first, in order, drawn from the 90-Day Leadership Rewire.
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What comes next, and what doesn't
Which of Develop, Coach, Design and Build you need. You may need one of them, or none.
Who it's for
Who is in the room.
The assessment answers a different question for each person who commissions it. Pick yours.
A straight answer for the board.
Where your leadership team is ready, where it isn't, and what closing the gap takes, in language your board already uses.
- The readiness score, in plain language
- The first moves, in order
Know which people systems to fix first.
Talent, performance and development, ranked by how much each one is holding AI back.
- The Judgment Audit findings
- Which systems still reward the old job
One read across every leadership team.
The same model applied to each company you oversee, so the results compare.
- One scoring model across companies
- Which teams need help first
Who runs it
A platform can score your people. It can't sit across the table from your CEO.
Mark Zides comes in and runs the assessment himself. He has spent more than 35 years building and leading companies where people, learning and technology meet, and he wrote the book on leading through AI.
- Founded
- CoreAxis, a learning and talent firm, acquired in 2022.
- Ran
- Luminoso, an AI company that came out of the MIT Media Lab, as CEO.
- Wrote
- Rewired Leadership (2026) and The #PACE Process.
The path
Uncover is step one. Here is what can follow.
Five steps, in order. Each one starts from what the last one found. See the whole path.
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You are here 01 · Uncover AI Readiness Assessment
- 02 · Develop Leadership Development If the gap is how your leaders lead. Explore →
- 03 · Coach Executive and Team Coaching If one leader, or one team, needs to move first. Explore →
- 04 · Design Talent and Performance Architecture If your people systems reward the old job. Explore →
- 05 · Build Learning and Enablement The delivery layer under all four. Explore →
Before you get in touch
Questions we get about this.
Anything not covered here, ask directly. We answer scope and pricing without a discovery gate.
A technology audit asks whether your systems are ready for AI. This asks whether your leaders, your talent processes and your performance system are. Most companies have only done the first.
Four weeks from the kickoff to the readout. Each member of the top team gives about an hour for a one to one conversation, plus the readout session. The survey for the next layer of leaders takes about 15 minutes.
The CEO and CHRO at the start, the top team in the conversations, and the executive team at the readout.
Yes. Nothing a leader says in a conversation is quoted or attributed to them by name. The readout reports patterns across the team, and who sees the individual profiles is agreed at the kickoff.
A fixed fee, agreed in writing before the assessment starts. It depends mainly on the size of the leadership team, and you get the number on the first call.
You decide. The readout says which of the next steps you need, if any: leadership development, coaching, talent and performance design, or learning and enablement. You can act on it yourselves, or with us.