you did not buy ai. you bought a very good demo.

a pilot is cheap relative to the budget, it produces a clean demo, and for one afternoon the future feels handled. then it sits in a slide deck.

companies have put thirty to forty billion dollars into generative ai and ninety-five percent report no measurable return, not because the models fail but because the pilot was the product: built to pass a meeting, not to carry the work.

the usual remedy is another pilot, a newer model, one more committee, which is how a budget disappears one promising slide at a time.

stop funding pilots. fund one workflow all the way to production, give it a named owner and a date it gets cut if it has not paid for itself, and know that the same study found tools bought from vendors reach production about three times as often as the ones built in-house.