Posts tagged with #strategy connect technology capabilities to strategic business outcomes through frameworks that resonate at board level.
Organisations are demanding disciplined, comprehensive business cases for AI initiatives that balance traditional financial rigour with frameworks capturing AI’s unique value creation patterns. In this fourth article in my series on AI business cases, I provide a step-by-step guide to building AI business cases that secure approval and set the foundation for successful implementation.
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 previous article, Transforming the Board: Using Decision Analytics for Strategic Advantage, I introduced the concept of AI-powered decision analytics as a transformative approach to board decision-making. I explored how these capabilities can help directors move beyond traditional backward-looking metrics to embrace predictive indicators that model potential futures and enhance strategic decision-making.
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.
The EU AI Act, which came into force on August 1, 2024, establishes significant penalties for non-compliance, including fines of up to €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover for serious violations. As regulatory frameworks for artificial intelligence rapidly evolve worldwide, Boards face a new imperative: navigating complex compliance requirements while maintaining the innovation speed necessary to compete.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the velocity of business decision-making and how organisations operate, compete, and create value. With AI, boards are moving from overseeing hundreds of decisions made per day to millions made per second - and they must be confident that each of those decisions is transparent, explainable, and correct.
In 1998, I walked into the headquarters of our newly acquired newspaper group in Leeds, a result of a private equity-backed management buyout of United News & Media’s regional newspaper and magazine titles. Tasked with ‘doing the internet’, I found a small semblance of online activity in the form of a basic advertising website for the Yorkshire Post. A couple of weeks of getting my feet under my desk yielded a digital goldmine - 271 years of content waiting to be transformed into digital assets.
As organisations adopt artificial intelligence (AI) more widely, a critical challenge emerges: how do you build and manage teams capable of delivering on AI’s promise of increased productivity, enhanced customer experiences, accelerated innovation, and sustainable competitive advantage?