1.6 — Aligning Solutions to Business Value Pillars

CCAR-P Domain 1 · Task 1.6

What You Need to Know

Five Business Value Pillars

Pillar	Meaning
Efficiency	Same outcome with less input (automating existing process)
Transformation	Capabilities not previously possible
Productivity	People ship more/better with AI assistance
Cost	Unit economics vs human/legacy baseline
Performance SLAs	Contractual latency, availability, quality targets

Test: does the capability already exist? Yes → efficiency. No → transformation.

Design Decisions Tied to Pillars

• Model selection — per-task cost/performance; smallest model that meets quality bar
• Prompt caching — ~90% cache-read cost reduction; serves cost + latency SLA (static first, dynamic last)
• Batch processing — halves cost of async work; sacrifices request-path latency
• Multi-agent — ~15× tokens; name the pillar that pays for it

Key Concept: Caching helps repeated static prefixes on the request path. Batching helps asynchronous volume off the request path. They are directional opposites on latency.

SLA Engineering

• Latency: p95 budget decomposes into per-stage budgets; stage times sum
• Availability: forces fallback design (degraded modes, queuing, human fallback)
• Quality: accuracy floors require evaluation machinery in the feedback loop

Value Case

Baseline before build. State hypothesis (pillar, metric, target, how measured) and verify after.

Exam Traps

• Defaulting to the most capable model for every task
• Classifying automation of an existing process as transformation
• Offering batch for interactive use cases (or caching for one-off async volume)
• Accepting sequential large-model calls against a tight p95, or availability with no fallback