AI business case
The evidence that an AI use case changes a business outcome, net of the work needed to keep it dependable. A demo or a benchmark score is not a business case.
An AI business case names the business result that should change, by how much and by when, and then counts what it really costs to get there. The count includes the supervision, exception handling and recovery work that keeps the system dependable after launch, not only the licence fee and the build.
A demo shows that something can work once. A benchmark score shows how a model performed on a test set. Neither is a business case. If the questions about outcome, constraint and recovery have no answers, the honest label is that there is a demo, not a case.
Exploration can be funded without a full case, as long as the budget is small, explicitly exploratory and judged on what it teaches. An investment in transformation should be compared against an outcome. Do not ask a learning experiment to invent a return, and do not exempt a larger investment from comparison because it is labelled innovation.
Related terms
ROI
Return on investment: the value gained relative to the cost. For AI it is easy to overstate by counting local savings and ignoring supervision, exceptions and recovery.
Cost per accepted outcome
The total cost of getting one AI-assisted result that is actually accepted and used, counting model spend, retries, human review, exceptions and recovery — a truer measure than cost per call.
Recovery distance
The amount of human and system work needed to get from an AI failure back to a safe, correct state — a cost that belongs in the business case, not just the demo.
AI pilot
A limited trial of an AI use case to test whether it works in practice. A pilot proves one team can succeed; capability starts when others can reproduce the result.
Used in these essays
The 10-minute test for whether an AI use case has a business case
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