AI Readiness: An Integrated Socio-technical Framework

Despite its high potential for increasing efficiency, productivity and automation, the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in production is still at a very early stage and lacks practical experience, particularly in the small and medium sized enterprise segment. One of the main reasons for that is the lack of knowledge on how ready the companies are for adopting and using AI effectively. While approaches to assessing readiness and even maturity in terms of digitalization or Industry 4.0 are well established and discussed in the literature and used actively in companies’ practice, approaches that address AI are still in their infancy. Addressing this gap, this paper presents a qualitative approach to an in-depth analysis and monitoring of the readiness of manufacturing firms for working with AI. Drawing on the literature on technology adoption on the one hand, and the implementation of AI on the other, we develop an integrative framework covering different socio-technical dimensions. For their operationalization, we use a large range of technical, organizational and environmental categories. In order to illustrate the implementation of our approach in practical terms, we present the results of assessing the AI readiness of a German manufacturing company.