Your developers say AI makes them faster, and they’re probably right. But if someone asked you where AI is helping delivery across your teams, and where it’s quietly making things harder, could you answer with more than an impression?

That’s the question the AI Delivery Health Check is built to help you answer. It’s free, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes, and it’s written for leaders of AI-enabled teams: people responsible for two or more delivery teams where AI tools are already part of the work. If you lead one team, it works just as well. Answer for that team.

Take the AI Delivery Health Check

Faster coding isn’t faster delivery

Picture a restaurant kitchen that buys a much faster oven. If the prep counter, the pass and the waiting staff stay as they were, the food doesn’t reach the tables any sooner. It piles up at the pass, it goes cold, and the people working there feel the pressure.

AI coding tools are the faster oven. They speed up one step of several. Whether delivery speeds up depends on everything around that step: how work gets checked, how big each change is, how the people in the team learn and cope, and whether anyone can show what’s changed.

My view is simple. “AI makes you go faster” increases the pressure on teams to deliver, and AI can produce more than a team can absorb. Neither shows up in a count of how often people use the tools. So the Health Check doesn’t ask about tools. It asks about the delivery system and the people in it.

What the check looks at

There are 15 questions across four areas.

  • Pace: speed that holds (4 questions). Whether work is piling up somewhere between written and delivered: the review queue, the size of changes, what’s been expected of the teams since AI arrived, and whether you can see where work waits.
  • Trust: humans in the loop (3 questions). The ground rules for AI, how closely work is checked before it ships, and who owns the problem when AI-assisted work breaks.
  • Team: people still matter (5 questions). Whether people talk openly about how they use AI, how newer people are building their skills, how roles are changing, whether problems get worked through together, and how people are coping with the pace.
  • Impact: the right work, proven (3 questions). Whether you can show what AI is doing for delivery, where it gets aimed, and whether anyone checks the outcome for users.

Team has the most questions on purpose. Most delivery measures say a lot about the work and very little about the people doing it, and AI changes how people work faster than teams get round to talking about it.

Each question is answered on a five-point scale. The answers describe what you’d actually see in your teams, such as queues, rules and conversations, rather than how anyone feels about AI, so you can answer from where you sit. Every question also has “I don’t know”. It doesn’t pull your score down, and if half or more of an area’s answers are “I don’t know”, the result says so, because a blind spot is worth knowing about in itself.

What you get back

You see the result on screen as soon as you finish. There’s no account to create.

  • An overall score out of 100 and a band: Stretched, Uneven, Steady or Strong. The bands describe how the delivery system is coping, not how good anyone is.
  • A score and band for each of the four areas.
  • The area to focus on first, with the reason taken from your own lowest answers.
  • One thing to try with your teams this week. For example, if the review queue is your lowest answer, the step is to count, each morning, the pieces of work waiting for review or testing, agree a limit, and when the count goes over it, help finish and check before starting anything new.
  • A video to watch on your focus area.

If you’d like to keep your result, you can have it emailed to you. Separately, you can sign up for emails from Adapt Labs. Both boxes start unticked, and the result doesn’t depend on either.

Your answers are stored without your name, email address or IP address, and deleted after two years. The privacy page has the detail.

What it isn’t

If you were searching for an AI maturity assessment or an AI readiness assessment for your engineering teams, it’s worth being clear about the difference.

A maturity model places you on a ladder of stages. A benchmark compares you with other organisations. The Health Check does neither. There’s no league table, because there’s no honest data to build one on, and it doesn’t grade you or your people. It isn’t a certification or a formal audit either.

What it gives you instead is a view of how your delivery system is coping with AI, the area that needs attention first, and one concrete step. For a busy leader, one clear first move is worth more than a long list of everything that could be better.

How to get the most from it

  • Answer for your teams as a whole. If they differ a lot, think of the typical team, and go with what’s true most weeks.
  • Don’t aim for a good score. There are no trick questions, and the most useful result is an honest one.
  • Try the step before you retake it. Give it a couple of weeks, then take the check again and see whether your focus area has moved.
  • Remember whose view it is. This is how things look from where you sit. Teams often see some of it differently, and the gap is usually where the most useful conversation starts.

Take the AI Delivery Health Check. It’s free, and you’ll have your focus area in about 5 to 10 minutes.