Your champion has more to lose than to gain.

The previous piece asked who owns the money. There is a second question about that same person, and it is one to answer yourself rather than put to them. What happens to them if this goes wrong?

The fourth of seven moves in the Asymmetric Challenger model is motivation. The idea is simple enough: in any contest the side with more at stake fights harder, and that settles things more often than the product does. I have always aimed it at competitors. Try aiming it at your own champion.

If they back a new AI agent and it underdelivers, that is theirs. Their name is on the business case, on the vendor choice, on the rollout. If they back nothing, the status quo carries on costing whatever it has always cost, and nobody pulls them into a room to explain it.

Which is also why a better payback number doesn't shift them. It raises the company's upside, and the company's upside was never the problem.

What does shift them is smaller and less satisfying. A first phase they could stop without having to explain themselves. Something they can put in front of people in the first month or two, long before the real number lands, so they have banked a bit of credit while the outcome is still open. Best of all, a deadline somebody else owns, because then doing nothing becomes the failure with their name on it.

Two deals, same product, opposite risk

Selling contract analysis for IBOR transition was straightforward, because the legal counsel had a cessation date and a regulator watching it. If that work slipped, the finding had their name on it. Selling the same product for contract leakage was much harder, and the money was bigger. No date, nobody watching, and a procurement lead who would own every disappointment personally and nothing at all by waiting.

The software was identical. What waiting cost the buyer was not.

So ask your champion a better question. Not what the company gets, but what they get, and who will notice.