Our operations manager is asking for a sixty-thousand-dollar software budget to automate our workflow with AI, but as a non-technical owner, I cannot tell if this is a genuine operational leap or expensive theater. How do I vet this request before signing the check?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Demand an operational business case, not a technical demonstration. When internal teams or outside vendors pitch custom artificial intelligence, they usually lead with algorithmic complexity. Strip that away. Refrain from treating this as an AI project. Treat it as an operations-improvement project where machine learning happens to be an underlying mechanism.

First, require your operations leader to map the exact process on paper. If they cannot describe the five distinct steps of the current workflow, feeding it into a custom model will only automate chaos. Ask them to pinpoint the single bottleneck that limits capacity.

Second, calculate the hard cost of that bottleneck. If a coordinator spends fifteen hours a week moving data between two platforms, that friction costs you roughly twenty thousand dollars a year in payroll. Approving a sixty-thousand-dollar build to solve a twenty-thousand-dollar annual headache is bad math.

Third, insist on a cheap prototype using off the shelf tools before writing a large check. Most operational bottlenecks can be solved using commercial language model APIs connected through basic middleware like Make or Zapier. If your team cannot prove measurable time savings with a five-hundred-dollar proof of concept over thirty days, they will not succeed with a sixty-thousand-dollar custom build. Make them show you verified capacity gains before allocating capital.