This is the major problem with the way data science is managed in most organizations. You typically have business analysts or other management types queuing up work that they _think_ could go somewhere, but they have typically not done the necessary legwork to figure out if a market actually exists for the solution that you're going to build. If a business analyst can't tell you:

1 - What problem you're trying to solve.

2 - What a valuable solution to that problem requires (in gory detail), including model metrics.

3 - What a customer is willing to pay for that solution.

4 - What the timeframe looks like for a valuable solution.

5 - How many resources (people, money) the company is willing to devote to this project.

Then the ROI on that project is zero, because there is a very high likelihood that any solution you build will not satisfy the demands of the market.