How to Fund the Right AI Use Case
This week: New video on YouTube - how to find the right use-cases to fund your AI initiatives. How to make data-driven decisions based on infrastrcuture gap and business value.
Hey everyone,
Mnay organisations I talk to gathers 50-100 AI use cases. They hold a big “priority workshop.” They vote on business value, strategic fit, and stakeholder excitement. They pick the top three, hand them to the engineering team, and wait for the magic to happen.
Six months later, the project is quietly shelved.
The reason? “The data infrastructure doesn’t support it.”
In my latest video, I talk about why this happens and more importantly, how to stop it using a framework I’ve been developing for production AI.
The “Human-to-Agent” Gap
The core problem is something I call the “Human vs. Agent” data standard.
As technical people, we often forget that data built for a human analyst is completely different from data built for an AI agent.
Humans can reconcile messy schemas and ask a colleague for help.
AI Agents cannot. They either fail, or worse, they fail silently.
If your infrastructure is built for BI dashboards, it simply won’t sustain a fully autonomous AI agent.
The 8-Dimension Assessment
To fix this, I’ve broken down AI readiness into 8 key dimensions across two groups:
1. Data Infrastructure: Consumers, Access Latency, Schema Rigor, and Metadata.
2. AI Operations: Error Handling, Memory/State, Evaluation, and Observability.
The goal isn’t to be “perfect” at all of them. The goal is to be honest. When you score your current setup (1 to 4) against what a use case actually requires, the “readiness” of your project stops being a debate and starts being a number.
Finding Your “Beachhead”
The most actionable part of this framework is finding your Beachhead Use Case.
A beachhead isn’t your most ambitious goal (like a fully autonomous loan negotiator). It’s the use case where:
1. The infrastructure gap is small (you can ship in weeks, not months).
2. The business value is standalone (it pays for itself immediately).
By starting here, you aren’t just “doing a pilot” - you’re building the foundation that makes the ambitious stuff possible later.
Want to run this assessment yourself?
I’ve put together a full walkthrough of these 8 dimensions and how to build your own “Gap Map.” If you’re tired of the “AI priority workshops” that lead nowhere, this might be the most useful 15 minutes of your week.
Check out the full breakdown here.
I’d love to hear your thoughts—drop a comment on the video and let me know which of the 8 dimensions is currently the biggest blocker in your org.
Have a great weekend,
Sandi.
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