The Why:
A Direction for AI Investment

The critical question is no longer whether to invest in AI. It is whether that investment delivers measurable business outcomes. For many organizations, it has not. As the cost of producing code goes to zero, the real challenge is figuring out where and why to deploy capabilities like AI.³ Impactful ROI still relies on translating complex human problems into clear needs and workflows to build systems that deliver reliable results. Without a clear intent, organizations commit money and resources before understanding the specific outcomes they should produce. AI exacerbates this, and does so at a consequential cost. AI scales whatever it is pointed at, meaning a misaligned investment now multiplies just as fast as a sound one.

Gartner expects roughly a third of enterprise applications to embed agentic AI by 2028, up from less than one percent in 2024.⁴ And AI capability is arriving faster than most organizations can decide what to do with it.

Business and technology leadership must align on the questions that matter most: which business outcomes are we trying to deliver, where in the customer experience they have the most impact, and how much value they produce?

Maximizing ROI and value from AI comes from understanding the human experience, not from leading with the technology.⁵ We have seen this pattern before. When mobile arrived, adoption went to the products that got the user experience right, not to those that led with the technology. AI is the same shift at greater scale: the advantage goes to organizations that understand the employee experience behind the customer lifecycle and use that to focus AI on the high-impact touchpoints where both revenue and operational gains are won.

Identifying those high-impact touchpoints is what Jobs to Be Done is built to answer. A job is the outcome a person is trying to achieve, independent of any product, system, or tool. It is human, and it lasts: technologies turn over and markets shift, but the underlying job a customer or an employee is trying to get done changes slowly, if at all. This is what makes a ‘job’ the right unit of strategy. It is stable enough to build on, and it carries the outcome that every downstream product strategy decision must address.

Jobs do not describe only customer outcomes, however. Our adaptation applies the same framework inside the enterprise, surfacing the internal jobs its people must perform to serve the customer lifecycle. That view shows business and technology leaders which jobs drive the most value and best align with strategic priorities, before any significant investment. Initiatives that cannot trace their way back to a job and its outcome risk never reaching the P&L or delivering meaningful ROI. What follows is our methodology in practice; how a job becomes the operating model of the business.