The role
Business excellence assessments are the mechanism GCC governments use to evaluate their own entities against structured maturity models — covering strategy, operations, innovation, and, increasingly, AI and digital.
I serve as an assessor on those assessments. The work involves reviewing entities’ documentation, interviewing their leadership, evaluating the evidence against the model, and producing findings that feed back into national programme scoring.
What the assessments actually measure
The AI and innovation criteria in these models are not superficial. They ask, in effect: do you know what AI you are using, do you understand its impact, do you have the governance to answer for it, and is your leadership seriously engaged in that question?
Those are 42001 questions asked from a different angle.
The confidentiality frame
Everything specific inside an assessment is confidential — the entity, the findings, the maturity score, the remediation trajectory. That confidentiality is absolute and it is not negotiable.
What is not confidential is the pattern. Across enough assessments, common failure modes emerge. Common enablers emerge. Common misinterpretations of what "AI governance" is supposed to mean emerge too.
Those patterns — stripped of anything that could identify an entity — inform the Institute’s advisory work and the Field Notes series. Never the specifics. Always the shape.
Why it matters
Anyone advising governments on AI governance without ground-level exposure to how they actually operate is guessing. Excellence assessment is one of the few structured ways to get that exposure legitimately. It is public-service work — but the second-order effect on the advisory practice is real.