Ready for What? Rethinking AI and Robotics Preparedness for Adoption and Policy

<p>Efforts to accelerate AI and robotics adoption require evidence about where communities are prepared to act and where support is still needed. However, conclusions based mainly on average differences between people or stakeholder groups can obscure relationships that emerge when the same person evaluates different challenges. We address this problem using a repeated card-based survey in which 982 participants provided 15,200 evaluations of 17 AI and robotics challenges. Each challenge was rated on common 1-5 measures of significance, complexity and readiness, where readiness refers to perceived community preparedness and available resources rather than personal competence or realised adoption. Because each participant evaluated multiple challenges, the design separates stable differences between respondents from challenge-specific deviations within the same respondent. This distinction materially changes the interpretation of preparedness. Within the same respondent, a challenge rated one point more complex than their usual level is associated with approximately 0.21 points lower readiness ($p&amp;lt;0.001$). By contrast, respondents who generally rate challenges as more complex do not systematically report lower readiness ($p=0.29$). Significance is positively associated with readiness, while unusually high complexity modestly weakens this challenge-specific alignment. These relationships also vary strongly across challenge families, and professional background remains associated with adjusted preparedness assessments. On applied cards, confidence, trust and related perceptions provide substantial additional information about readiness, including for held-out participants. For policymakers and organisations, the findings show that averaging across stakeholders can hide challenge-specific barriers. Readiness assessments should therefore preserve both differences between stakeholder groups and variation within the same stakeholders across challenges. Effective adoption and literacy strategies should ask not only \emph{who} appears ready, but \emph{which challenges} they find unusually difficult and whether the likely constraint concerns implementation, capability, assurance or resources.</p>