Measure the current work, estimate a realistic improvement, include operating and review costs, and decide how you will verify the result.
Name the workflow and its owner
An AI business case becomes easier to evaluate when it names a piece of work. Preparing service requests is specific. Transforming operations is too broad to price, test, or hold anyone accountable for.
Describe where the workflow starts and ends. Name the business owner. State the operational constraint: slow response, limited capacity, inconsistent information, avoidable errors, or work that cannot keep pace with demand.
Be clear about the decision the business case supports. You may be deciding whether to fund discovery, release a first version, or expand a system already in use. Each decision needs a different level of evidence.
Establish the baseline with real work
Sample representative cases. Count volume, active handling time, waiting time, corrections, and exceptions. Include people who work differently and cases that are harder than average. Averages alone can hide where the effort really sits.
Suppose a purely illustrative workflow handles 600 requests a month and takes eight minutes of active effort per request. That represents 80 hours of handling. If the new workflow saves three minutes on each eligible request, the maximum gross saving is 30 hours before accounting for eligibility, review, and exceptions.
The arithmetic is simple. The assumptions deserve the attention. What fraction of requests is eligible? Does the saved time become usable capacity? Will staff spend longer reviewing uncertain outputs?
Include the cost of running it
Implementation is one cost. Ongoing service, infrastructure, model usage, integration maintenance, quality review, and staff time are others. The business needs the combined picture.
Set out a conservative, expected, and optimistic case. Use a range when the evidence is uncertain. State which assumptions discovery or a controlled release will validate.
Capacity is valuable without automatically becoming a cash saving. If the team uses the time to improve service or absorb more demand, name that outcome. Avoid counting both a labor saving and the same hours as additional capacity.
Agree the evidence that earns expansion
Choose a small set of measures: handling time, error rate, response time, or completed work at an acceptable quality. Record the baseline and how each measure will be collected.
Set a review point and a decision rule. What result justifies expanding? What failure would require a redesign? Who can stop the workflow if quality drops?
A one-page business case can contain the workflow, baseline, expected benefit, total cost, assumptions, and validation plan. That is enough to make the next decision explicit and keep the project connected to business value.
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