Executive AI Decision Checklist

Ten questions to answer before funding an AI initiative.

1. What business decision must improve? State the decision in one sentence.
2. Who owns that decision? Name the accountable business leader, not only the technology team.
3. How is it made today? Document the workflow, evidence, delay, inconsistency, cost, and risk.
4. What measurable outcome would prove improvement? Establish the baseline, target, time horizon, and method of measurement.
5. What role should AI play? Inform, recommend, automate a bounded step, or act within approved limits.
6. What evidence does the system require? Identify data sources, quality, access, freshness, lineage, and acceptable uncertainty.
7. What architecture supports the outcome? Account for models, infrastructure, networking, data, applications, APIs, identity, integration, observability, and resilience.
8. What can go wrong at runtime? Define security controls, permissions, human oversight, monitoring, escalation, recovery, and shutdown conditions.
9. Who operates and governs it? Assign business, technical, risk, security, data, and service ownership.
10. What is the first measurable motion? Define the next real action, owner, date, evidence, and decision gate.

Funding gate

If the team cannot answer these questions, it is not ready to make a technology commitment. The next investment should be in clarity, not capacity.

Technology does not create business value. Better decisions do.

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