Efficiency is a decision a CFO can model in an afternoon. New revenue from AI is a portfolio of bets, and it dies in the business case when it is valued the same way. This tool helps you find the play, test the riskiest assumption first, and fund it in stages a CFO can actually approve. It is how a company moves out of the Efficiency Trap and becomes a Reinventor.
Four revenue patterns · a six-axis lens · a four-stage funding ladder · no email required · download the one-pager
AI makes new money in four patterns. Every candidate should map to one. If it does not, it is usually efficiency wearing a revenue costume.
A service that was uneconomic to deliver one customer at a time, now delivered at scale. The senior human in the loop becomes the exception, not the unit cost.
A capability that could not exist before the model, embedded as a feature or product a customer will pay for on its own.
Usage or outcome-based pricing that AI makes measurable and defensible, capturing value you were leaving on the table under a seat licence.
A market that was too small or too costly to serve until the cost of serving it collapsed. The long tail, smaller accounts, a new geography.
Take one candidate. Read it on six axes, low, medium or high. You are not ranking it. You are finding the one assumption most likely to kill it, because that is what the first stage of funding is built to test.
Score all six axes to get the riskiest assumption and the funding stage to start at.
You do not ask a CFO to approve the whole thing on faith. You buy it in stages, each priced as an option on the next. Spend rises only as uncertainty falls, and you can kill cheaply at any gate. Killing is the system working, not failing. Score your play above and the stage you should start at lights up.
Write the bet in one sentence. Name the riskiest assumption. Set the kill criterion now, while you are still honest.
The cheapest test of the riskiest assumption, almost always demand. Time-boxed, micro-budget, no build beyond the minimum.
Real customers, real small revenue, real delivery. You are now testing whether it repeats and what the unit economics look like.
Fund growth only once the economics hold and the play is defensible against a competitor buying the same tools.
Three governance choices make the mechanism work. Ring-fence a small reinvention budget that does not sit under the same ROI bar as efficiency. Run it as a portfolio and expect most Stage 1 probes to die, because a portfolio where nothing dies is not taking real bets. And give it one named owner with a quarterly review where advance-or-kill decisions are made at the gates.
Two artefacts to run this with your CFO or your board. The whitepaper explains the four patterns, the six axes, and the four-stage funding ladder in depth. The Claude prompt runs the diagnostic conversationally against your specific idea and drafts the Probe brief the CFO can approve.
The framework in twenty-two pages. Four revenue patterns, the six-axis qualifying lens, the four-stage funding ladder with evidence gates and kill criteria, and a CFO memo template that fits on one page.
Download PDF→Paste the prompt into a Claude project. Classify your AI idea against the four patterns, score it one to five on six axes, get a funding-stage recommendation and a draft Probe brief for your CFO. Ten minutes to run.
Copy the prompt→Most companies stay in the Efficiency Trap because reinvention has no home in the operating model or the budget. If you would like Ortent to help you build the portfolio and the governance around it, most engagements start with a Sprint Diagnostic. Not sure where you sit? The AI Value Gap survey places you on the efficiency-versus-revenue map.