Tagged with: #decision-making

Finding high-value AI opportunities requires looking beyond the obvious. While most organisations gravitate toward trendy applications like chatbots, the most impactful AI initiatives often lie in less visible but more strategically significant processes. By applying a structured evaluation approach that examines process characteristics, strategic alignment, and implementation feasibility, boards can identify AI investments that deliver transformative value across multiple business dimensions. This systematic method ensures scarce resources target opportunities with the greatest potential impact rather than those with merely the highest visibility or short-term appeal.

Building on my previous thoughts about why traditional business cases fail for AI investments, this article explores what I consider to be the essential building blocks for a more effective evaluation approach. This foundation provides boards with the tools to assess AI’s unique value creation patterns while maintaining financial discipline - helping leaders confidently navigate investment decisions that conventional models simply cannot adequately evaluate.

In today’s AI-driven landscape, traditional business case methods fall short when evaluating AI investments. Drawing from my experience developing AWS’s cloud business case tools, I explore why conventional ROI models struggle with AI’s parallel, multi-speed adoption patterns. Unlike cloud’s sequential journey, AI initiatives exist simultaneously across different maturity stages, creating valuation challenges that standard metrics can’t capture. Boards need new evaluation approaches that account for AI’s diverse cost structures, varying timelines for returns, and how investments in one area often enable value in entirely different parts of the business.

In my article The Board in the machine, I argued that “Boards will find that there are no barriers to making the right decisions at the speed of light”. More recently, in AI is transforming governance: Six key Boardroom priorities, I observed that boards “are moving from overseeing hundreds of decisions made per day to millions made per second”. This acceleration of business decision velocity presents both an unprecedented challenge and opportunity for Directors and the Boards they serve.