Cost savings have a ceiling

Most AI business cases I see are about efficiency.

Cut the support team. Reduce the hours. Trim the cost per ticket.

Fine. Those gains are real. But they share one flaw.

You can only save so much. The cost of a process is a floor you approach and never break through. Best case, you get it close to zero. Then you are done.

Growth has no such ceiling.

Take customer service. Frame it as cost, and the win is a smaller team. Frame it as experience, and the same AI lets you answer every customer faster, serve more of them, keep the ones you were losing.

One version shrinks a number. The other grows the business.

Andrew Ng made this point about the companies he advises. The exciting projects are almost never the cost ones. They are the ones that drive growth, because that is where the ceiling disappears.

The drive-through that takes orders by voice. The contact center that turns a complaint into a saved account. Same technology, pointed at growth instead of subtraction.

So before you sign off on the savings case, ask the harder question.

If this AI made the experience better instead of cheaper, what would that be worth?

Subtraction is safe and small. Growth is where the real number lives.

What would you build if you stopped counting what you could cut?

Source: Andrew Ng, The Future of AI Agents, Interrupt 26 (LangChain, June 2026)

See also: How serious is your company about AI?