the ftc just banned an ai sales company from ever selling to businesses again.

in march the ftc barred air ai and its owners from marketing business opportunities, after charging that the company sold small businesses on ai sales agents using income claims it could not support. the comedy is structural, not personal: a company selling software to replace your sales team was itself running a sales pitch no software could have made good on.

the cost does not land on the people who wired them money, it lands on the whole category, because buyers now expect the sequence to be demo, number, subscription, with the working system optional. gartner expects more than 40 percent of agentic ai projects to be scrapped by 2027, and almost none of that is the model failing, it is that nobody could run it in production once the vendor stopped presenting.

the advice going around is to vet vendors harder and ask for more case studies, which is asking a sales process to police itself. do the version that holds: before you sign anything, write down the workflow it touches, the single number it should move, and the person inside your company who owns it on the monday after go-live. a vendor who cannot answer those three in writing is selling you the demo.