# Incrementality

The portion of an observed outcome that would not have occurred without the AI initiative.

The question a counterfactual is trying to answer, stated as a number rather than a method. If a sales team was already improving before an AI tool shipped, some of the observed lift is not incremental — it would have happened anyway. Almost nothing in this category's vendor tooling attempts to isolate this.

**Related research:**
- [The Widening AI Value Gap](https://measuredvalue.ai/research/bcg-widening-ai-value-gap-2025/)