The pressure to launch or scale AI initiatives is stronger than ever, but our firsthand experience shows that deploying AI alone isn’t enough. Effective implementation requires thoughtful strategy and precise execution, as, ultimately, AI is just a tool that delivers lasting value only when it’s aligned with business goals. The most impactful approach to AI begins with clearly defining these goals, identifying high-impact use cases, and ensuring a focus on change management from the outset. Without this foundation, even groundbreaking tools risk falling short if employees don’t see their value or experience real benefits. When innovation is met with skepticism, trust can erode, creating barriers for future initiatives and fueling resistance to change.
To answer the question, “How do we realize value from AI?” it’s essential to connect every initiative with core business objectives, focusing investments on high-impact areas. This approach emphasizes ROAI—Return on Artifical Intelligence—ensuring that AI solutions drive measurable results while allowing teams to concentrate on work that matters. By leveraging modern technologies like Salesforce, Data Cloud, and Snowflake, organizations can achieve these outcomes with precision and alignment, transforming AI from a concept into a tangible, valuable asset.
How We Approach ROAI
When we engage with a company on AI, innovation, modernization, or transformation, we start by collaborating to define business goals—for this year, the next, and beyond. From there, we identify key business moments or use cases that could benefit from AI or innovation. Using our experience and industry benchmarks, we map these use cases to their expected impact, creating a prioritized roadmap to guide your project. You’ll see opportunities for Quick Wins alongside High-Impact, High-Value initiatives—and we help you actualize these with the right measurement structures to ensure your investments deliver real value.
True North C.A.R.E. Model
Coastal’s True North methodology leverages our C.A.R.E. business impact model to guide your AI initiatives toward:
C.A.R.E. Business Impact Model
Cost Savings
Efficiency gains across people & process
Acquisition
New customers or sales acceleration
Retention
Reduced churn rate
Expansion
Incremental revenue, cross-sell, upsell, price increase
No AI solution is successful without the people behind it. Coastal provides hands-on guidance to ensure your organization is ready to fully leverage AI’s capabilities by addressing “what’s in it for them.” We help bring your team along on the AI journey, ensuring they don’t just understand the tools—they’re excited to use them.
Real Situation
Recently, an innovative educational institution approached us with the goal of expanding their impact. Together, we deconstructed their student experience and identified key moments that could benefit from enhanced interactions. By mapping out the expected returns, we created a strategic roadmap of initiatives. Starting with a high-impact, low-effort project, we demonstrated success by implementing Salesforce AI to summarize customer service calls, resulting in increased student enrollments and more empathetic call handling. Now, we’re advancing to additional use cases, each with clear success KPIs.
Let’s Achieve Your ROAI Together
Ready to navigate your AI journey with Coastal? Let’s focus on what matters most and unlock the true potential of AI in your business today.
