Economic Viability
“Does it create justified value?”
Evaluates total cost per governed decision or completed task against the full recurring operating burden.
Does the net value survive when human review capacity, monitoring, and error-remediation costs are included?
Raw model token pricing is used to project enterprise ROI while ignoring review and error costs.
The economic unit must be the governed task, incorporating downside error cost sensitivity.
Economics: True Governed Task Cost vs Vendor Rate Card
Vendor token rate cards account for less than 15% of true operational expenditure. Human exception queues, verification reviews, and error write-downs determine whether an AI system creates economic viability or structural balance-sheet loss.
API: $0.04 | Human Review: $0.18 | Error Buffer: $3.00
Accounts for 2.5x exception surge under distribution shifts or downstream API latency degradation.
CAUTION: AI option is 1.89 MORE expensive than simpler heuristics.
Evidence Conditions for Economic Viability
Is the economic unit defined around the governed decision or completed task rather than a narrow model/API cost?
Have recurring production costs been included: data, inference, retrieval, monitoring, human review, incidents, and control burden?
Has the proposal been compared with the strongest credible non-AI or simpler intervention on cost and risk?
Does the value case remain defensible under realistic error, review-capacity, volume and downside assumptions?