AI readiness is the degree to which an organization's people — individually and collectively — can absorb, adopt, and sustain AI-enabled ways of working. It goes beyond technical infrastructure and training to include the psychological, motivational, cognitive, and organizational conditions that determine whether adoption actually happens. Most organizations invest heavily in tools and skills but never measure whether their workforce is positioned to use them productively.

AI adoption typically stalls because organizations treat it as a technology or training problem when the real barriers are psychological and organizational. Common drivers include competence threat (employees fear AI diminishes their expertise), identity disruption (uncertainty about what their role becomes), cognitive overload (no bandwidth to learn something new on top of existing workload), and insufficient organizational support (managers aren't equipped to guide the transition). These barriers don't respond to more training — they require different diagnosis and different intervention.

An AI readiness assessment is a diagnostic that measures the conditions that influence whether AI adoption will succeed or fail across an organization. Unlike engagement surveys or change management frameworks, a purpose-built readiness assessment measures factors like psychological threat, perceived usefulness, cognitive capacity, and organizational enablement — and produces actionable insights about where adoption is likely to break down and why. AIRE (AI Readiness & Enablement) is a diagnostic framework developed by Alpenglow Insights that delivers these insights in under five weeks.

Skills training addresses knowledge gaps — how to use a specific tool or platform. AI readiness addresses whether someone is psychologically, cognitively, and organizationally positioned to absorb that training and apply it productively. A person can complete every training module and still not adopt AI if they feel threatened by it, don't see its relevance to their work, are already at cognitive capacity, or lack managerial support. Training is necessary but not sufficient. Readiness is the foundation it depends on.

Employee engagement surveys are designed to measure satisfaction, sentiment, and culture — not whether someone can successfully adopt a new way of working. They ask "are you happy?" when the question that matters is "can you absorb this change?" Engagement surveys can't tell you whether an employee has the self-efficacy to learn a new AI workflow, whether they perceive AI as useful to their specific role, whether they have the bandwidth to take on something new, or whether their manager is equipped to support the transition.

The most significant psychological barriers include competence threat (fear that AI diminishes hard-won expertise), identity disruption (uncertainty about one's professional role and value), cognitive overload (insufficient bandwidth to learn new tools alongside existing work), trust deficits (lack of confidence in leadership, the technology, or job security), and systemic bias (research shows women and other groups face additional barriers including trust gaps and competence perception penalties when using AI).

No. AI use is not a monolith. Different roles require different levels of AI adoption, and pushing universal adoption can create unnecessary pressure and burnout. The goal isn't to get everyone using AI — it's to understand where AI adoption actually matters for organizational outcomes, ensure the people in those roles have the conditions they need to succeed, and recognize that non-use is sometimes appropriate rather than a problem to fix. Effective AI readiness work helps leaders distinguish between acceptable non-use and problematic resistance.

AIRE measures four domains that predict AI adoption outcomes: Threat and Confidence (psychological readiness), Perceived Usefulness (motivation and value alignment), Bandwidth and Overload (cognitive capacity), and Organizational Enablement (structural support). The assessment produces a department-level heat map showing where adoption will flow and where it will stall, identifies the primary barrier to adoption, and generates a 90-day action plan. The full diagnostic takes under five weeks.

Adaptive capacity is the psychological, social, and systemic conditions that determine how much change people can actually absorb and act on. Every workforce has adaptive capacity, but most organizations have never measured theirs. When adaptive capacity is low — due to overload, threat, lack of support, or other factors — even well-designed AI rollouts will struggle to gain traction. Measuring adaptive capacity before investing in transformation helps leaders intervene precisely rather than reactively.

Alpenglow Insights is an AI workforce readiness consultancy founded by Dr. Wendy Rasmussen, a licensed clinical psychologist with a PhD in Psychological and Quantitative Foundations from the University of Iowa and an Executive MBA from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Dr. Rasmussen served as a Navy psychologist conducting organizational assessments in high-stress environments before building AIRE, a diagnostic framework that measures the psychological and organizational barriers to AI adoption. Alpenglow Insights works with leaders navigating AI adoption through advisory sessions and organizational diagnostics.

Change management frameworks are designed for deployment — they focus on stakeholder alignment, communication, and process redesign. They are valuable but reactive, addressing resistance after it surfaces rather than identifying the conditions that predict resistance before it appears. AIRE operates upstream, measuring the psychological and organizational factors that determine whether adoption will succeed before capital, credibility, and momentum are committed. AIRE diagnoses; change management intervenes. Ideally, organizations use both — with AIRE informing where and how change management resources should be directed.

A Power Hour is a focused, one-on-one session tailored to your specific AI adoption challenges. There are no frameworks to sit through and no pre-work required. It's a direct conversation about what you're seeing in your organization, what's likely driving resistance or uneven adoption, and where to focus your efforts for the highest impact. Power Hours are available as single sessions or ongoing advisory engagements, and are designed for leaders who know their teams well and need a thinking partner rather than a full diagnostic.

Yes. AIRE's architecture is designed to scale across organizations, making it possible to benchmark readiness, track changes over time, and identify patterns across portfolios. For philanthropic organizations, workforce development funders, and AI transformation consultancies, AIRE can serve as a standardized field measure — surfacing which populations are at risk of falling behind and generating the evidence infrastructure needed to direct intervention resources where they matter most.