Independent AI readiness assessment for UK retailers
Steve Webster provides an independent AI readiness and value assessment for UK retail and consumer businesses from £20m to £1bn. It establishes where AI will actually pay back in your business, where it will not, and what has to be true first, independent of any vendor, because Barking Cat sells no AI and earns nothing from what you buy.
Why it is needed
92% of retail and CPG executives plan to increase AI budgets (NVIDIA, State of AI in Retail and CPG 2026). 6% are capturing real enterprise-level value from AI (McKinsey, The State of AI, November 2025). Nearly everyone is spending and almost no one is winning, and the gap between those two numbers is organisational rather than technical.
There is rarely anyone in the room whose job is to separate the commercial problem from the technology being sold to solve it. Every vendor deck carries an AI line, and the person assessing it should not be the person selling it.
Who carries it out
Steve Webster, founder of Barking Cat Advisory, who has run retail and ecommerce P&Ls since 1999, up to £240m, at Barbour, eXtra, Steinhoff UK and Boohoo. He holds the Google Cloud Generative AI Leader certification and judges the AI category of the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards.
What the assessment covers
Two to three days on site, deliberately, because the finished score comes from evidence rather than a survey.
The AI Inventory. What the business has already bought, whether it is integrated into a workflow, owned by someone against a commercial outcome, and creating value. This includes the tools individual teams licensed that never reached a central register, which are often the most revealing evidence in the whole engagement.
The walk. The operating model read across three lenses: creation (content, imagery, copy and studio), agentic (feeds, product data and machine discoverability), and process (service operations, merchandising workflow, reporting, reconciliation, and the manual work nobody has counted).
The five foundations. Data, Process, People and Capability, Governance, and Commercial Ownership, each scored Ready to Build, Contain and Prepare, or Foundations Absent. Most professionally run businesses sit at Contain and Prepare on most of them, and Ready to Build is earned rather than assumed.
The opportunity engine. Every AI opportunity the walk surfaced, named as a specific commercial move rather than a technology, plotted for value against the effort to build it in your business, then tested against the foundation it depends on.
What you receive
A written assessment, which stays as the record. It names the binding constraint, the one foundation whose absence blocks the most opportunity, with the alternatives rejected and the reasons given. It sequences the opportunities that will pay back, states the exclusions plainly, and is argued with your leadership team in a working session.
The answer is allowed to be no
The assessment can conclude that an AI investment should not proceed, or should wait. AI pays back where the business already has the data, the process discipline and the decision rights for the thing being automated. It does not pay back where it is bought to compensate for their absence. Waiting is the right answer more often than the vendors suggest.
The assessment is not an implementation plan, a vendor selection or a build. Barking Cat is paid a fixed fee, stated in writing before instruction, takes no referral fees from vendors, and does no implementation work.
Try the first hypothesis yourself
Run the five foundations on your own business: twenty-one checks, thirty minutes, and nothing leaves your browser.
The method in full
How the Barking Cat AI Diagnostic is undertaken.
What happens next
Thirty minutes, no pitch. If there is work worth doing, a fixed-fee proposal in writing within two working days. Then the engagement, or a plain no.
Contact
Thirty minutes, no deck.
Tell Steve what is not moving. If there is a problem worth solving, the conversation will find it. If Barking Cat is not the right answer, you will hear that first.
steve@barkingcat.ai