How to find the weak point stalling AI adoption
Most teams score the same on paper but need completely different fixes underneath.
Samantha Stark is founder and chief strategist at Phyusion and an advisor to Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy.
Ask a communications team what is slowing their AI adoption and you will usually hear one of two answers: insufficient training or a lack of time.
Both are real. But naming the barrier is the easy part. Knowing which one to fix first is where teams stall.
Nearly all (98%) of communications teams are using AI in some way, according to Ragan’s 2026 State of AI and Communications report. But fewer than 20% say it is integrated into their workflows and strategy, creating a significant drag on AI adoption efforts.
Here are three ways to find your starting point:
Read the dimensions, not the total. The AI Readiness Assessment, powered by Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy and Phyusion, scores comms teams across eight dimensions: strategy and leadership, culture and change management, data and content, tools and technology, talent and skills, process and workflows, governance and ethics and measurement and outcomes.
Most teams score very weak in one or two areas and middling across the rest. A single total averages that away. The breakdown tells you where to focus for the next 90 days.
Clear the weakest one or two, then work up the next tier. For example, your governance score is 35% while everything else is in the 80s. No amount of tooling will get you past the governance bottleneck. The same issue arises when there’s a strong toolset but the culture is such that nobody feels safe admitting they used it.
Two teams can post the same total and need to start in opposite corners. One needs governance written before it can move. The other already has the rules and needs someone senior to say out loud that using them is encouraged. Clear that first constraint, then come back for the dimensions in the 60s that should be in the 80s. Readiness is a sequence, not a single fix.
Baseline before you prescribe. Survey your team before you launch anything. Ask about usage, confidence and barriers, and take the time to answer seriously. Time is a leadership signal. When nobody has protected hours to learn and experiment, it’s because nobody above them has decided this is the work. That answer comes from working the dimensions underneath, in order.
Take the AI Readiness Assessment, then look past the number to the one or two lines pulling it down. That is where to start.
