A strong opportunity balances value, practicality, company advantage, evidence quality, risk, and timing.
Five questions before funding
Ask five questions before funding an AI bet:
- Does the opportunity rely on proprietary data or rights competitors cannot easily access?
- Does it embed scarce human judgment that already matters to commercial or operational outcomes?
- Does it improve a repeated workflow rather than a one-off experiment?
- Would repeated use make the system better over time?
- Would it strengthen customer access, trust, or reasons to stay instead of only saving labor?
Signals to look for
- Proprietary or hard-to-replicate data advantage.
- Scarce domain expertise embedded in current operations.
- A repeatable pattern that can scale across products, customers, or internal workflows.
- Clear evidence that adoption would improve with repeated use.
Weak claims to challenge
- A wrapper around the same public model everyone else can use.
- An automation concept with weak linkage to measurable pain.
- A broad platform build before one workflow has earned the right to exist.
- A claim that sounds strategic but cannot survive a sponsor-level challenge process.
Turn the answers into a score
Use a worksheet to score company advantage separately from practicality. A quick pilot and an advantage that grows over time are different decisions and should not be ranked the same way.