I need to get our board and co-owners aligned on investing in automated backend workflows, but they are highly skeptical of technology trends. How do I pitch these AI initiatives without sounding like I am chasing a shiny new toy?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If you want to get your board and co-owners on board, stop using the term AI in your pitches. The moment you frame a proposal as an AI or machine learning project, you trigger skepticism about tech hype and wasted budgets. Instead, frame these initiatives strictly as operations-improvement projects that happen to use automated tools to solve a specific bottleneck. Focus your entire pitch on the concrete operational outcomes, like increasing capacity, reducing error rates, or accelerating throughput times. Mention machine learning only as a minor technical footnote in the execution plan. For instance, do not say you want to build an AI-powered customer service system. Say you are launching a project to reduce customer support response times from twelve hours to five minutes while freeing up forty hours of weekly staff capacity. Present the project through the lens of your V/TO® and your weekly Scorecard. Show how automating this specific step in your Process Component directly supports your corporate goals and protects your gross margins. By focusing on the hard operational metrics and the bottom-line impact, you steer the conversation away from tech theater and ground it in practical business reality. Your stakeholders will support the project because they want the business to run more efficiently, not because they care about the underlying technology.