Most companies are no longer asking whether AI will transform their business, rather, they are dealing with the difficult question of whether their organization is ready for the AI era.
While new tools can be introduced quickly, genuine adoption requires people to understand where AI creates value, leaders to set a credible direction, managers to translate ambition into everyday work, and employees to feel safe enough to experiment, question, and learn. AI transformation is not primarily a technology deployment, but has to do with organization-wide enablement.
This was the starting point for Brillian’s collaboration with Aalto University’s International Design Business Management (IDBM) Industry Project. The 5-6 month program brings together international student teams, faculty, and company partners to address complex business challenges through the combined perspectives of business, design, and technology.
We gave the team a deliberately open brief regarding a human-centered way to support clients through AI transformation. We wanted to understand what enables an organization to move from interest and isolated experimentation to meaningful, sustained change.
Over the course of the project, the student team interviewed more than 40 executives, academics, industry leaders, and frontline employees across Finland, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. They also traveled to London, Stockholm and Seoul to examine how AI adoption was developing in markets moving at different speeds.
The research reinforced a pattern we repeatedly see in our own work: AI initiatives don’t fail because of technology, but because the organization are not ready to absorb it.
One of the key findings was the AI readiness is uneven within the organization: A company may have a compelling AI strategy but little trust among employees. It may have strong technical capabilities but no clear ownership of transformation. As a result, AI readiness a combination of conditions that develop at different speeds. Across all three countries, the team encountered similar barriers for a successful AI transformation: fear, low trust, limited psychological safety, and a gap between executive ambition and organizational reality.
Before an organization can decide what to do next, it needs an honest understanding of where it stands. While sounding straightforward, AI readiness can be difficult to discuss openly, particularly when people are not incentivized correctly to do so.
Together with the students, we chose to focus on organizational readiness and future planning to help bridge this gap, by making the organization’s current state visible across the whole company. We wanted AI readiness to be treated as a question of organizational behavior, employee experience, leadership, and strategic change. This direction became Brillian Constellations.
Photo: Brillian Constellations is available as a prototype at https://www.brillianconstellations.com/.
Constellations is a concept for a gamified AI-readiness assessment aimed primarily at middle management. It examines readiness through three interconnected dimensions:
Culture and attitudes, including trust, confidence, openness, and psychological safety.
Strategy and resources, including leadership direction, priorities, ownership, investment, and access to relevant capabilities.
Operational and technical readiness, including processes, data, infrastructure, governance, and the organization’s ability to put AI into practice.
Rather than relying only on conventional rating scales, the concept uses scenarios, open questions, and interactive inputs. The intention is to make assessing AI readiness more engaging as well as encourage more considered and candid responses.
The results are visualized as a constellation in which the position, size, color, and distribution of stars represent different aspects of organizational readiness. The visualization makes gaps and misalignments easier to see: in other words, easier to discuss, too.
You can play with Brillian Constellations yourself here: https://www.brillianconstellations.com/.
Constellations is currently a strong concept and prototype rather than a finished product, but our team at Brillian is now thinking about how to onboard this into our client projects. If you want to be the first client to test it out, reach out to us.
Photo: Brillian Constellations shows a 3D visualization of your company's AI readiness.
The project helped clarify five principles that we believe are central to successful AI transformation.
Photo: Brillian Constellations offer practical guidance on what companies should keep a close watch on.
The end result exceeded our expectations at Brillian: we received up-to-date research on AI transformation as well as a nearly finished tool for measuring companies' AI maturity. We're able to put the project's outcomes to use in sales, in marketing, and in consulting work across the Advisory team's client projects.
We're proud to have given these six students a real, unresolved problem to work on, and even prouder of what they built. Companies like ours are laying the groundwork for a stronger, more human-centered AI ecosystem in the Nordics – and this project has given us a concrete new tool to help do exactly that.