The AI Readiness Checklist for Think Tanks
Mark CunninghamSo you want to deploy an AI agent on your own data. But is your data ready?
Most organizations think AI is a "Technical" problem. It's not. It's a "Data Hygiene" problem. You can buy the most expensive NVidia GPUs in the world, but if you feed them garbage, you will get garbage. Before you sign a contract, you need to clean your PDFs. The success of RAG depends 80% on the quality of your documents and 20% on the model.
The Checklist
Here are the 3 critical questions to ask:
Are your PDFs machine-readable?
Many legacy reports are just scanned images of text. The Test: Open a PDF and try to highlight a sentence with your mouse. If you can't text-select it, the AI can't read it. You need an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline.
Do you have consistent metadata?
AI needs context. Without a clear Publication Date, the model treats a report from 1990 as equal to a report from 2024. Ensure every file has "Date", "Author", and "Version" tags so the AI can answer "What is our current stance?" correctly.
Is sensitive PII redacted?
Once data is in the model, it is searchable. Ensure no private donor lists, internal staff salaries, or unreleased drafts are mixed into the public research folder. Read about our security model.
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Mark Cunningham
Founder & CEO
Building the future of verified research. Previously solving data problems for enterprise. Obsessed with RAG, sovereignty, and clean code.
Make your research answerable.
Stop letting your insights get lost in PDFs. Turn your archive into an intelligent expert today.
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