Stop bringing me AI use cases. Bring me one paying customer.
Almost every company I talk to right now has the same problem. Too many AI use cases. Too many decks. Too many "AI strategies". Too many pilots that look incredible in a demo and quietly die six weeks later.
This is the AI slop tsunami. And most leadership teams are drowning in it.
More process just makes slower slop
The instinct is to add order. Governance frameworks. Scoring rubrics. Use-case workshops. Another committee. It looks like discipline, but it is really just another layer that produces the same slop, only slower.
The problem is not that you lack a process. The problem is that the process filters the wrong thing. It ranks ideas by how good they sound in a room full of people who do not own the outcome. And ideas that sound good are cheap. You can generate twenty in an afternoon.
The filter that works
So I started using one filter. It is brutal and it works:
Don't bring me a use case. Bring me one paying customer. Internal or external. Someone who will actually use this thing weekly - or pay real money for it. There is no third option.
- Not "users would love this". Anything can be lovable. That is not a commitment.
- Not "the addressable market is huge". The addressable market will not use one of your twenty ideas next Tuesday.
- Not "we'll figure out adoption later". Adoption is the work, not a footnote.
One name. One signature. One real user. That single question kills 80% of AI use cases instantly. And that is exactly the point.
The hardest skill in AI right now isn't prompt engineering or model selection. It is saying no to nineteen brilliant-sounding use cases so the twentieth - the one with a real user - actually ships.
The bottleneck isn't building, it's choosing
Here is what nobody wants to admit: the bottleneck in AI right now isn't building. Models are commoditised. An engineer can ship a prototype in a weekend. The bottleneck is choosing - deciding which 1 of 20 brilliant-sounding ideas actually deserves a quarter of someone's life.
Once you have a real user, everything else gets simpler:
- Technology decisions become obvious. You build what they actually need, not what is interesting.
- Prioritisation becomes obvious. Their problem comes first.
- Success metrics become obvious. Do they keep using it.
- ROI conversations become obvious. They are already paying.
Without a real user, you are just generating expensive slop on top of free slop. And no governance framework gets you out of that, because it scores decks, not commitments.
If you are drowning in use cases and looking for the filter that separates the one worth building, get in touch. I am happy to look at where exactly your decision-making is getting stuck.
