Why AI Gains Disappear Before They Reach the P&L
Someone in operations gets access to an AI tool on a Tuesday. By Friday they have built an agent that reconciles vendor invoices in twenty minutes instead of two days. They demo it. People clap. Somebody says "imagine this across the whole company." Six months later the invoices still take two days. The agent works fine. It just hands its output to an approval queue that meets on Thursdays, pulls from a spreadsheet finance doesn't trust, and runs on a personal account that security found out about last week. I hear some version of that story almost every time I talk with leaders about AI. Different industry, same plot. Here's the problem. The AI isn't failing. It's being bolted onto a company that was built for something else.