Build the AI and cybersecurity
business case your board will fund.
Australian small and medium businesses rarely lose the technology argument on technique. They lose it because no one quantified the value, the risk or the waste before asking for budget. This tool does that in two minutes, using assumptions you can defend in the room.
How do you build a business case for AI and cybersecurity investment?
A credible AI or cybersecurity business case quantifies three things before it asks for money: capacity recovered from repeatable work, expected incident cost avoided by control uplift, and technology spend recovered through rationalisation. FORTE/CYBERx models all three from six inputs and derives the annual funding level at which the programme still returns three dollars for every dollar spent.
- Inputs
- Headcount, salary, manual hours, technology spend, compliance driver, exposure
- Outputs
- Capacity recovered, risk cost avoided, waste recovered, funding hurdle
- Return hurdle
- 3:1 before a programme is considered worth funding
The investment case
before the invoice.
Most technology proposals fail at the board because nobody quantified the value first. Set six inputs and this builds the same one-page case we take into an executive meeting: capacity recovered, risk cost avoided, technology waste removed — and the funding level at which the programme still returns 3:1.
Your organisation
Modelled annual value at stake
$115,314
Across 21 people doing repeatable work at an effective $68 per hour, with $28,320 of expected incident cost sitting on the register each year.
Hours returned to the business by governed automation and better process design.
Expected annual incident cost removed by a risk-based control uplift.
Duplicate tooling, unused licences and renewals nobody owns.
Funding hurdle
$38,438
Any programme delivered under this annual figure still returns 3:1 on the modelled value. Above it, the case needs a different argument.
Effort shape
3 days / month
Indicative fractional CIO cadence for this size, exposure and compliance driver. Certification-grade evidence also unlocks contracts that screen suppliers.
Assumptions you can challenge
- — 35% of staff carry meaningful repeatable, judgement-light work.
- — Salary is loaded 25% for on-costs and spread over 1750 productive hours.
- — Only 35% of identified manual hours are counted as recovered value.
- — Control uplift is credited with avoiding 45% of expected incident cost, not all of it.
- — Vendor rationalisation recovers 12% of annual technology spend.
- — The break-even threshold applies a 3:1 return hurdle before any programme is worth funding.
This is a decision aid, not an audit or a guarantee of savings. Every figure is modelled from the inputs above and should be validated against your own baseline.
Four rules for a case that survives scrutiny.
Set the inputs honestly
Headcount, average salary, manual hours, technology spend, compliance driver and risk exposure. Round rather than guess precisely — the case survives challenge on method, not decimal places.
Read the three value lines separately
Boards fund capacity, risk and waste for different reasons. Presenting them as one blended number is the fastest way to lose the room.
Use the funding hurdle, not a price
The threshold tells you what the work is worth to your organisation. Any proposal above it needs a strategic argument as well as a financial one.
Validate against your baseline
Take two of the assumptions and test them against real data — a timesheet sample and a licence report are usually enough to firm the case up.
Pressure-test your investment case
Send the modelled case through and a senior operator will challenge the assumptions, refine the figures and tell you what would need to be true for it to hold.