Strategic Alignment — Did This Produce Value?
4. What nobody budgets for
AI-augmented work does not slot into an unchanged organization. Three changes are required, and initiatives that defer all three have deferred their own results.
Role redesign
If the constraint is verification capacity, then the scarce role is not the producer — it is the reviewer. And reviewing is currently nobody's job description, which means it is being done in the margins of jobs designed for something else.
Capability development
The four Core disciplines are not intuitive. An organization deploying AI without teaching them is relying on individual judgment at exactly the point where judgment is hardest and least supported.
Policy updates
Approval tiers, retention, disclosure, escalation paths — most were written for a world in which every action had a human author. They do not fail loudly when that stops being true. They simply stop describing what happens.
The business case
The artifact this module produces. Six sections:
| Section | Must contain |
|---|---|
| Problem | The organizational problem, stated before any mention of AI |
| Intervention | What the workflow does, and its scope boundaries |
| Governance | Approval tiers, the record, who is accountable |
| Measurement | Metrics that survive the free-to-fake test, with baselines |
| Cost | Including review time and the three changes above |
| Rebuttal | What would show this was the wrong call |
The last row is not optional. A business case with no stated falsification condition is advocacy. That is Toulmin's rebuttal, arriving at the executive level.