The AI agenda your budget holder approves
Whoever releases the budget does not approve enthusiasm or a list of tools. They approve a sequence with criteria: what comes first, what it costs, what it proves, and what makes it stop.
Turn scattered AI initiatives into a one-page agenda, with a sequence, a business case per initiative and explicit criteria for continuing and for stopping.
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A portfolio of intentions is not an agenda
What usually reaches the decision table is a list: ten opportunities, a paragraph each, all marked as priorities. There is no sequence, no cost, no statement of what each one proves. The meeting ends asking for more study, and time passes.
An agenda differs from a list in three ways: it has a justified order, a value attached per initiative, and it says what happens if the first one does not work.
The first initiative funds the others
The choice of the first is not the one with the highest potential, it is the one with the strongest evidence and the fewest dependencies. Its job is different: it has to prove, inside your company, that an operation leaves the slide deck and enters the results.
Ordering criteria that survive the first hard question: current cost already known, measured volume, data available today, an area with a willing owner, and a result finance knows how to verify.
One page per initiative, not thirty
An AI business case nobody reads does not protect the decision. The useful version fits on a page and answers six questions: what work changes, what it costs today, what it will cost, what has to exist for it to work, which risk we accept and how we measure it in ninety days.
Current cost per unit of work, multiplied by monthly volume. It is the only number that does not depend on an optimistic projection, because the company already pays it.
Every initiative needs a stopping condition
The question that separates a mature agenda from an optimistic one is what makes it stop. Without that definition, weak initiatives consume budget through inertia, because nobody wants to be the person who cancelled.
Legitimate stopping conditions: cost per case above a ceiling, exception rate above forecast for two cycles, a dependency unresolved by the deadline, or a change in the process that changes the premise.
Who reviews it and how often
An agenda without a review rhythm becomes a filed document. The functional minimum is a quarterly review with three facts per initiative: where it stands, what it consumed, what it proved. An initiative that has not moved in two cycles goes back to the queue or is closed.
The five questions you need answers for
Why this one first and not another. What it costs and where the budget comes from. Who answers for the result. What happens if it does not work. How we know it worked, with which number and on what timeline.
An agenda that answers those five on one page gets approved far more often than a thirty-page portfolio that answers none.
One-page business case
Pick the initiative you would take first and fill in the three columns. If any line cannot be filled with information that already exists, it is a dependency to resolve before proposing.
| Initiative | Known current cost (per month) | What it proves and in how many days |
|---|---|---|
The initiative with a known current cost and a proof defined within ninety days is the one that opens the agenda. The rest follow in sequence, not in parallel.
Basis
The agenda described here is how investment decisions are defended in any company, with or without a board: sequence, value, owner and stopping condition. AI is not an exception to that pattern.
When the agenda becomes an investment decision
If you have a first initiative with a known cost and a proof criterion, there is a basis to assess execution. Prumo Discovery structures the baseline, the feasibility and the recommendation before capital is committed.