Are we ready for AI? A comparative analysis of AI readiness and preparedness indexes

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping economic structures, governance, and global power dynamics. Yet existing AI readiness indexes often provide a distorted view of countries’ capabilities—rewarding formal strategies and patents while overlooking deployment-first innovations, informal economies, and adaptive governance capacities. These biases particularly disadvantage Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This paper makes two contributions to the AI readiness agenda. First, it empirically documents the divergence and conceptual inconsistencies across leading AI readiness and preparedness indexes. Second, it proposes a two-tier measurement framework: a Composite Readiness–Preparedness Index (CoRPI), providing a transparent baseline diagnostic, and an Adaptive AI Readiness Index (AARI), capturing context-specific capacities and policy learning. Together, these frameworks aim to balance comparability with relevance. By piloting the AARI in LAC, the region can serve as a testbed for a model of AI governance and measurement with global applicability.