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COMPEL Glossary / ai-business-case

AI business case

A six-part document — hypothesis, investment, benefit, risk profile, financial summary, recommendation — that justifies an AI investment with explicit counterfactual and confidence bands.

What this means in practice

Distinct from generic business cases by the explicit token-economics decomposition, drift-risk adjustment, and externality accounting.

Synonyms

AI investment case , AI value-and-investment case

See also

  • Risk-adjusted NPV (rNPV) — Net present value with stage-probability and risk-weighted discount applied at each cash-flow stage — capturing both the time value of money and the probability-of-success at each lifecycle gate.
  • Total cost of ownership (TCO, AI) — Build + run + refresh + govern + retire cost across an AI feature's full life.
  • Unit economics — Cost and revenue per atomic unit — per transaction, per successful decision, per hour saved — for an AI feature.
  • Counterfactual outcome — The outcome that would have occurred without the AI intervention — the benchmark against which incremental AI value is measured.

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