The play · Baseline in week one
Your board does not want AI. It wants the number AI moves.
Most AI dashboards track activity. Prompts sent. Seats licensed. Hours "saved," as guessed on a survey. Every one of those can go up while the company gets nothing back.
Before you build anything, put five numbers on one page:
- One north-star KPI per use case. Close rate. Days to collect an invoice. Cost per ticket.
- Cost per handled task. Loaded cost, before and after.
- Hours returned. Counted from real calendars, not guesses.
- Payback period. Total cost divided by monthly savings.
- Error and exception rate. Savings with no quality number is a trap.
Run it this week: pull real volume from your systems, time one unit of the work, record today's error rate, and get the owner or CFO to sign off on that before picture. That signature is what makes every later claim defensible.