How an AI readiness assessment is transforming the Public Sector
Hungary’s national AI strategy set an ambitious course for the country’s digital future, a hundred-page roadmap, an independent advisory council, and a mandate for every public sector entity to begin demonstrating compliance. In theory, a bold vision. In practice, a significant problem for organisations like our client, the public body responsible for managing tenders and subsidies.
They found themselves caught between a government directive and an uncomfortable reality: they didn’t have the internal knowledge or resources to act on it meaningfully. They knew they needed an AI strategy, they just didn’t know where to start, or what one should look like for a public body like them.
Building the bridge between aspiration and action
They approached one of their suppliers, the country’s largest telecoms provider, who they had an existing relationship with. This organisation brought in Zenitech as AI experts and because they had active AI projects already underway with us. What started as a kickoff conversation quickly evolved into something more substantial.
Rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution, we developed a structured consultative framework built around three interconnected workstreams: auditing the organisation’s current state, advising on AI strategy creation, and assessing their true level of AI readiness.
The readiness assessment mapped across six to nine distinct vectors, examining the maturity of the organisation’s data infrastructure, their cultural adaptability to change, and critically, their readiness to hand certain human decision-making processes over to AI. Each dimension was scored on a one-to-five scale, giving leadership a clear, honest picture of where they actually stood, not where they thought they were.
The bigger opportunity this work has unlocked
The immediate output was a comprehensive AI strategy, delivered directly to the client, a tangible, actionable plan rooted in honest and analytical assessment rather than hype-driven aspiration.
But the value didn’t stop there.
The engagement produced something equally important: a replicable methodology. The framework developed for them now serves as a consultative toolkit that can be deployed with other organisations facing similar pressures, particularly in sectors where AI adoption is being driven by external mandates rather than internal conviction, where the temptation to either panic or overclaim is highest.
From the strategy phase organisations move to the structured ideation: generating AI use cases specific to them, evaluating each against difficulty and potential return on investment, and plotting them onto a four-quadrant strategic map. The result isn’t a wish list, it is a prioritised, realistic roadmap that will identify their optimal “sweet spot” for AI adoption. Not every organisation needs to race toward full autonomy. The goal is to find the right level of ambition for where an organisation is today and where they can realistically be tomorrow.