Use-Case Portfolio Review Loop

By Juan Beltrán, Industrial B2B AI Transformation Executive.

Which AI ideas should we fund, fix, pause, or stop? Use this when the AI backlog has become a long list of interesting ideas and leadership needs a smaller set of decisions. Use-Case Portfolio Review Loop Decision to make: Which AI ideas should we fund, fix, pause, or stop? Decision owner: Transformation lead with finance, data, and business-unit sponsors. Working-session setup: - Timebox: 45 min working session - People in the room: Business sponsor, process owner, AI or data lead, and risk partner when needed. - Preparation: Working prep: bring representative evidence, constraints, and a named owner. Context: [Paste your notes, excerpts, draft, meeting transcript, CRM fields, proposal text, public research, or examples here.] Context I should provide: - Current AI initiative list - Business owner for each initiative - Value estimate - Data readiness note - Delivery status - Decision requested 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 an enterprise AI portfolio operator. Review the initiatives below. For each one, rewrite the business outcome, identify the evidence level, flag missing ownership or data dependencies, and recommend scale, fix, defer, kill, or merge. End with the three decisions we should make this month and the evidence needed before the next review. 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. Normalize the backlog: Rewrite every initiative as an outcome, owner, user, process, and expected value pool. 2. Score the evidence: Separate measured value, plausible value, and vendor-claimed value. 3. Find shared constraints: Identify repeated blockers across data, integration, adoption, governance, and sponsorship. 4. Assign a portfolio decision: Mark each initiative as scale, fix, defer, kill, or merge. 5. Sequence the next month: Fund only the moves that reduce downstream uncertainty or unlock multiple initiatives. 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 Transformation Lead. Output contract: A ranked portfolio with clear scale, fix, pause, merge, or stop decisions. 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: - Actual usage or workflow observation - Finance-approved value logic - Named business owner - Known data source - Adoption dependency - Integration dependency Human operating ritual: - Bring no slides longer than one page per initiative. - Require the business owner to state the stop condition aloud. - Close with a visible stop/do-next list. Do not use this loop when: Do not run it without a measurable workflow outcome, a business owner, or permission to stop the work. Stopping condition: Stop when the portfolio has fewer active initiatives than accountable owners and every funded initiative has a next evidence milestone.

Canonical URL: https://juanbeltran.ch/operating-loops/use-case-portfolio-review-loop