Most AI backlogs are sorted by what is technically possible, which is uncorrelated with what any of it is worth. This framework is the selection method a CTO and a COO can run together in one working session, including the six dimensions and the answers that end a candidate's case on the spot.
The trap most technology groups walked into: ask engineering what AI could do, get an excellent list of technically possible things ranked by how interesting they are to build, then discover the backlog has three blank columns: who owns the outcome, what the process costs today, and which number is expected to move.
What the operators who reach production do: walk the value chain first, drawing candidates only from processes with high volume, high variance, high manual touch and a failure cost someone can quantify, then score each survivor on six dimensions and stop at the first disqualifying answer rather than averaging it away.
Not Hours
Two candidates can both save ten thousand hours a year and differ by two orders of magnitude in value. What separates them is money per unit of work: the loaded cost of one transaction, the revenue at risk in one decision, the penalty attached to one error. Nobody calculates it, so effort flows to cheap work.
Count the people who must alter a daily habit for the value to arrive, and treat the count as a cost. Four people in one team is a different proposition from four hundred across three regions. BCG puts 70% of program effort in people and process, and McKinsey puts the failure rate of large change program near 70%.
A selection method that has never produced a refusal is not a method. The scarce resource is senior engineering attention, and it is being divided by the number of live items rather than concentrated on the ones that pay. Name the refusals as output, with a reason against each, and review the list quarterly.
Process, volume per month, cycle time, error and rework rate, loaded cost and a named owner for each number. Blank cells are not discussed in the room, they are sent back. Six to eight process owners can usually fill this in a week.
Fifteen minutes on volume, variance, manual touch and failure cost, led by the COO with no technology discussion permitted. Expect eight to twelve candidates out of an inventory of forty or more, because ranking by ease of demonstration is the failure this prevents.
Value density, tolerance for error, data at the decision point, process stability, decision latency in milliseconds, and change-management load. Do not average a disqualifier away against a strong score elsewhere, because that is exactly how unbounded-failure use cases survive a review.
Separate the highest-value candidate from the correct first candidate, and pick the one that forces retrieval, evaluation, access control, observability and cost governance into existence. Then assign the operations owner, set baseline capture at two weeks, and re-score quarterly.
No, but it will re-score it. Run the six dimensions across live initiatives and anything hitting a disqualifier goes to the refusal list with the reason recorded. In most portfolios that frees senior engineering attention rather than reducing output.
Operations owns the number, engineering owns feasibility, and both score in the same room. The shortlist stage is led by the COO with no technology talk permitted, because ranking by ease of demonstration is precisely the failure this method exists to prevent.
The first build also constructs your platform: retrieval, evaluation, access control, observability and cost governance. A mid-value case that forces all five beats a high-value case that forces none, since the next two initiatives run on whatever the first one leaves behind.
Not usefully. The inventory is the method. Six to eight process owners can usually produce volume, cycle time, error rate and loaded cost for their own area in under a week, and that exercise alone tends to surface the strongest candidate.
That is a normal output. Several disqualifiers point straight at a process fix, a data fix or a system of record change. Saying so in the first fortnight is cheaper than discovering it eight months into a build nobody can measure.
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