Board AI Business Case Loop

By Juan Beltrán, Industrial B2B AI Transformation Executive.

Is this AI proposal strong enough for board-level funding? Use this when an AI initiative sounds exciting but the value, risk, owners, and staged funding logic are not yet clear. Board AI Business Case Loop Decision to make: Is this AI proposal strong enough for board-level funding? Decision owner: Executive sponsor with finance, transformation, technology, and risk leaders. Working-session setup: - Timebox: 60 min working session - People in the room: Decision sponsor, subject owner, and one credible challenger. - Preparation: Decision-room prep: validate the baseline, risks, costs, and accountable owner first. Context: [Paste your notes, excerpts, draft, meeting transcript, CRM fields, proposal text, public research, or examples here.] Context I should provide: - Investment request - Business outcome - Baseline metric - Value estimate - Implementation plan - Risk register - Owner model Safety boundary: - Use only information I provide in this conversation. - Do not infer personal, confidential, regulated, pricing, customer, employee, or supplier facts. - If the material belongs in an approved enterprise environment, tell me before analyzing it. Instructions: Act as a board-level AI investment reviewer. Convert this proposal into a decision memo. Identify the business outcome, value bridge, operating owner, adoption risk, implementation risk, and staged funding gates. Recommend approve, revise, stage, or reject. Run the session in this order: 0. Inspect the context. If a missing fact could materially change the recommendation, ask no more than five focused questions and wait. If I ask you to continue, mark each missing fact as unknown. 1. Translate the initiative into business language: State the P&L, risk, customer, or productivity outcome without AI vocabulary. 2. Build the value bridge: Connect baseline, intervention, adoption, capture rate, cost, and timing. 3. Expose the operating model: Name who builds, runs, supports, governs, and benefits. 4. Stage the investment: Define what is funded now and what evidence unlocks the next tranche. 5. Write the board ask: Frame the decision, options, risks, and recommendation in one page. Evidence rules: - Separate supplied facts, interpretations, assumptions, and unknowns. - Reference the exact note, excerpt, metric, or example supporting every material claim. - Show the strongest credible counterargument to the recommendation. - Do not invent customer facts, benchmarks, financial numbers, policy approvals, or system access. - Do not turn missing evidence into a confident recommendation. - Keep the answer useful for CEO / GM. Output contract: A board-ready decision memo with recommendation, value logic, risks, and next funding gate. Return: 1. BLUF: the decision, recommendation, or draft in plain language. 2. Evidence table: claim, supplied evidence, confidence, and gap. 3. Assumption ledger: what is assumed and how to verify it. 4. Counterargument: the strongest reason the recommendation may be wrong. 5. Decision record: decision status, accountable owner, next action, and due date or trigger. 6. Evidence still needed: only the gaps that could change the decision. 7. Stop condition: state when the work is complete and when it must pause. Evidence checklist: - Baseline metric - Value bridge - Cost model - Adoption assumption - Risk mitigation - Named operating owner Human operating ritual: - Ban AI jargon in the first paragraph. - Finance must challenge the value bridge. - Every next tranche needs evidence, not optimism. Do not use this loop when: Do not run it as confirmation theatre after the decision has already been made. A human authority must approve the final decision and the operating environment. Stopping condition: Stop when the board can approve a staged decision without needing to believe a vendor narrative.

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