For searchers in their first year: be careful with the AI business case that leads with "hours saved per week".
It is the easiest case to sign off on, especially when you are new in the seat and want early wins. It is also the hardest to see in the results. Hours freed inside a team rarely show up anywhere on their own. They get absorbed by meetings, by slower work on other tasks, or by the next urgent thing. Twelve months later the tool is in use and nobody can say what changed.
What helps is deciding before the pilot where that capacity should go. In a business ofredactedpeople the options are usually few: handle more orders with the same team, turn quotes or support requests around faster, avoid a hire that was already planned, or move someone onto work that has been waiting for months.
Each of these can be tracked with figures the business already has. That gives you an honest review after a few months, and a clearer story for your board than a survey of how much time people think they saved.
It also makes choosing a tool easier. Once you know the result you want, name the one or two outputs the tool has to produce and test those first.
For a European SME that has just changed hands, there is usually plenty of operational work to point freed time at. The decision about where it goes belongs to the CEO, and it is worth making before the pilot is approved rather than after.
Happy to connect with anyone in this space.