Ranked by payback, not by hype. The seven AI projects with the shortest path to ROI for any service business with $1M to $20M in revenue.
Ranked by payback period, not by hype. These are the seven AI projects we have shipped most often for service businesses with 1M to 20M in revenue. If you fund all seven, you are looking at 6 to 14 months of payback at SMB scale. What we would do differently next time Looking back at the last six deployments in this category, three things we would do differently: Start the eval harness on day zero. We have always said this and we have always slipped it.
The first time we shipped without a regression eval, we caught a prompt change that silently degraded conversion by 11 percent for two weeks before anyone noticed. Now we treat the eval harness as the first deliverable, before the first prompt. Get the executive sponsor in the first user-acceptance session. Not the project manager, not the ops lead. The owner or the C-suite person whose name is on the budget.
Ranked by payback, not by hype. The seven AI projects with the shortest path to ROI for any service business with $1M to $20M in revenue. It is filed under AI Strategy because that is where operators looking for this problem actually start, and it is written from production work rather than from a content calendar.