Durability, not readiness.
The question that used to matter was whether a company could adopt AI. Most vendors are still answering the old questions: whether a company can adopt AI, and how. That no longer helps, because almost every company can now. It also leaves the most important question open: what a business is worth in the context of AI.
A readiness assessment looks inward. Do you have the data, the infrastructure, the governance, the skills. It produces a list of things to fix, and every company in a sector gets roughly the same list.
A durability assessment looks outward, at the customer. Will they still be paying in three years, and for what. Ours is VenDI℠: the Venes Durability Indicators for individual revenue streams.
Why it lands on revenue rather than technology
At the level of a profit and loss account, AI substitution is a labour event. Where a supplier's price moves with the customer's headcount, seats, hours, per-person fees, per-claim fees, a fall in that volume takes the revenue with it, with no change in how good the product is.
That is why we come at this from sourcing rather than from technology. Working out what a unit of human work costs, where it can be delivered and what breaks when it moves is the same discipline, applied earlier in the chain.
Where the argument is weaker than it sounds
Revenue is price multiplied by quantity, and the labour argument holds quantity still. Where cheaper delivery makes customers buy substantially more, revenue can rise while labour falls.
Timing matters too, and it is hard to see from the outside. Exposure tells you what is vulnerable. Contract dates tell you when it becomes real.
We describe a clock running on revenue that is priced against people's time. Published prices for buying people's time have not yet fallen across the board. We think the clock is running and has not struck; we want to make sure that our clients are ready.