If an AI pilot works, what evidence would persuade you to fund it across the business? Three years after our conversation about Digital Transformation Payday, I welcome Tim Bottke back to Tech Talks Daily to discuss PREVAIL, his book on the decisions leaders make before anyone selects a model. Tim's argument is that by the time a project disappoints, the questions that might have changed its direction can be months behind it.
We talk about what happens when the CTO wants room to experiment, the commercial team wants a better customer experience, and the CFO expects lower costs. Those are all reasonable goals, but they lead to different projects and different ways of measuring success. Tim describes how he used company filings to study patterns in what businesses say about AI over time. The filings can show how the story changes. They can't tell us on their own whether a quiet company abandoned a project or simply stopped talking about it.
I also asked Tim what a CFO should expect to see before approving an AI budget. His answer includes a baseline, a comparison with simpler options and the costs that appear once a pilot is running across the business, including model usage, maintenance and retraining. We discuss his idea of "latte time," a reminder that saving a few minutes for each employee leaves a separate question about what the business or its customers gain from the time saved.
The conversation turns to AI agents and what meaningful human control looks like. Tim argues that leaders should decide where an agent can act, which cases should be escalated and who has enough time and information to intervene. We finish with three decisions a team can make before its next funding meeting: define the problem, name the person responsible and decide what will happen after launch. I'd love to hear your experience. Which of those decisions has made the biggest difference to an AI project in your business?