An independent benchmark of AI and data assurance across each vertical and market - plotted from public information, measured against your internal reality. Clients get the drivers, the exposure, and what to do about both.
There is no independent baseline for AI and data assurance maturity. What exists is vendor research, written by firms selling the remedy, with samples they do not disclose. So the question gets answered with anecdote.
They ask what you plan to buy. They do not ask whether you could produce lineage for a board number tomorrow, because that answer does not sell licences.
Nobody scores their own estate honestly in a survey their employer might see. Anonymity is not a courtesy here; it is what makes the data worth anything.
Poor Data lineage in retail is customer-trust problem. in a grid operator carry different consequences. A single global average tells you nothing about your own exposure.
The value is not where you sit today. It is whether the gap between you and your sector is opening or closing while you invest in AI.
The whole sector is positioned from disclosed information, which is what makes the chart worth reading. What a client buys is the layer underneath it.
Deployment depth and disclosed AI investment, derived from annual reports, regulatory filings, published governance artefacts and enforcement history. Named, sourced, and checkable by anyone.
An anonymous survey of your own people, the drivers, your sector's pattern, and your position mapped against where you have decided to go.
So we do not ask one senior respondent. We survey your organisation anonymously, at every level that touches the estate, and score it on the same twelve dimensions. The result is not a maturity rating. It is the distance between what the executive team believes and what the people doing the work would say if it were safe to say it.
Responses come to us, never to your line management. We report no cut of the data with fewer than seven respondents, because below that a board can work out who said it.
Engineers, analysts, risk and audit alongside the executive. Where those two populations disagree is the single most useful finding in the report.
Identical twelve dimensions, identical five-level ladder. Your internal answers are directly comparable with your sector's public position.
If nobody in your organisation can answer the question, it scores as an exposure. A regulator will treat it the same way.
Each sector gets a risk board. Every dimension shows the share of participants who are exposed, defined-but-manual, or assured — and the sector's weakest dimension is flagged, because that is where the next incident in that industry is most likely to come from.
AI framework that plotts an industry's leaders on AI adoption, AI exposure, and AI client advocacy. Combining one objective outcome, one behavioural measure and one commitment measured. Applied to AI, the same three axes turn a scorecard into a board conversation about AI strategic direction.
How much AI is load-bearing — production systems touching customers, pricing, credit, or regulatory reporting.
Whether they could stand behind it. Scored on the same twelve dimensions as the index. The willingness-to-be-audited axis.
Returns the board can actually see and defend, not programme spend. Shown as dot size.
Making real money on a foundation that cannot be evidenced. Feels like success, and is one incident away from a restatement.
Deploying fast and able to prove it. Their next constraint is continuous assurance rather than remediation.
Capability without mandate. The blocker is the board's appetite, not the data foundation.
Carrying the exposure without the return.
Position tells you the state. Drivers tell you the cause, and they are what make the next wave worth reading. Each is regressed against all three axes.
The finding we expect to matter most: in regulated verticals, vendor concentration predicts assurance maturity more strongly than AI spend does.
The index uses the identical instrument as our diagnostic — so a participant's answers are comparable with their own assessment, and with everyone else's.
Twenty players positioned on deployment depth and disclosed investment from sources anyone can check. No client is advantaged in where they appear.
A named organisation is only plotted on the assurance axis where we hold survey data. Non-surveyed players show as unassessed. We do not publish an opinion about a firm's controls as though it were a measurement.
Every level that touches the estate, scored on the twelve dimensions. Minimum seven respondents before any cut is reported, so no individual is identifiable from a result.
If nobody can answer the question, it counts as an exposure. This is the single biggest reason our distributions sit lower than vendor research.
Regulatory exposure, vendor concentration, spend, board sponsorship, foundation quality, talent depth and consumer impact — tested for what actually moves position, not what sounds plausible.
Sources, sample size, response rates and the full instrument, including where the data was too thin to draw a conclusion.
A benchmark is worth reading twice. The first wave tells you where you sit; every wave after tells you whether the distance between you and your sector is growing.
This is not information control. It is the reason the survey works. If the executive team and the operating teams receive the same finding at the same moment, the response gets managed before it gets decided — and the anonymity that produced the honest answer is spent for nothing.
So the board sees the position, the internal gap and the drivers, and decides what it intends to do. Only then does the second release go to the functions who will carry it, framed as a decision already taken rather than a verdict on their work.
Nothing is edited between them. The second wave receives exactly what the first wave received.
We hold no commercial relationship with any AI or data provider, and nothing that identifies you leaves the study.
No provider pays to appear, to rank higher or to sponsor a category. The index is funded by the organisations being measured.
No reseller agreements, no channel partnerships, no referral fees from AI or data platforms. Nothing we report back earns us anything elsewhere.
We sell no software and run no implementation arm, so there is no product waiting behind your score.
Individual responses are never attributable, no organisation is named without written consent, and published results are anonymised.
Tell us your sector and market. We will come back within one working day with scope, the anonymous survey instrument, confidentiality terms and pricing for your vertical.