(Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash)

Is your company's AI acquisition-ready?

What I mean is: Does everything work as advertised? Or are your AI projects more aspirational than truly functional? That'll come back to bite you.

When you're talking with investors or gearing up for an acquisition, prepare for the counterparty to skip over your dreamy sales pitch and go straight for what counts.

That due diligence team will perform a thorough review of every AI project. They'll uncover anything that isn't up to industry best practices, risk exposures you haven't addressed, and other problems you've let slide. They'll note when your mission-critical functionality was built by people with minimal AI experience.

Their findings might impact the sale price – or, worse yet, nix the deal altogether.

This is when you'll tell me that you're years away from heading down the acquisition road, and that you're still heads-down building the company.

And I'll tell you that now is the perfect time to get started. Decisions you make today will impact that investment round or acquisition years later.

To steal a line from fractional CFO Sierra Hinson:

[Get] your house in order before anyone starts looking through it. The business leaders I have worked with who went through this process and were genuinely surprised by what we found. It’s better to be surprised with time to fix it than during a live process.

What Sierra says about your finances, I'm saying about your AI work. Get your house in order. You'll thank me later.

What can you do about it? Simple:

▶️ Book an AI assessment with me. ◀️

I'll check for problems, misalignment, and missed opportunities, then provide steps for remediation. All of this should smooth your path to acquisition. And help you sleep at night, too.

(For more details on how and why to prepare for an acquisition, I highly recommend Sierra's article from March: "What It Actually Takes to Sell a Company".)