Essay
The Best AI Use Case Is the One You Are Embarrassed By
Ask a leadership team for their flagship AI use case and you will hear something impressive: a customer-facing assistant, a strategy copilot, a moonshot. Ask which AI use case actually paid for itself, and if they are honest, it is something they are almost embarrassed to mention. Reconciling invoices. Reading claims. Tagging tickets. The boring stuff is where the money is.
Why the boring wins
The value of an AI use case is roughly volume times friction times repeatability. The flashy use cases are usually low volume, high stakes, and full of edge cases, which is exactly where AI is hardest to trust. The unglamorous ones are the opposite: enormous volume, painful manual friction, and a task bounded enough that a machine can do it reliably. That is the sweet spot.
A back-office process run ten thousand times a day, each time costing a person a few minutes of tedium, is a bigger prize than a dazzling assistant used twice a week. It just does not demo well.
The reason it gets skipped
It gets skipped for a human reason, not a technical one. Nobody gets promoted for automating the invoice queue. The prestige sits on the shiny front-end. So the highest-ROI work stays unfunded while the demo-friendly work absorbs the budget. That is a governance failure dressed up as a roadmap.
What to do now
- Follow the toil, not the glamour. List the tasks people do the most and enjoy the least. Your best use case is near the top.
- Score by volume times friction, not by visibility. Pick the one that moves a real number, even if it never makes a slide.
- Ship it quietly, then show the result. A boring workflow in production teaches more, and saves more, than ten impressive demos.
The best AI use case in your company is probably one nobody wants to present. Fund it anyway.
So which of your workflows is too boring to demo, and too expensive to ignore?