I'm Sick of AI

You want AI? Great. AI to do what?

Somewhere along the way, "we need an AI strategy" became a substitute for having a strategy at all. Executives walk into rooms demanding AI the way a kid demands a pony: no plan for feeding it, no idea where it sleeps, just certain they want one.

Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: an AI deployment is a project. And projects that succeed have objectives. Milestones. KPIs. Success metrics. Someone accountable for the outcome. The same discipline you'd apply to a new payment integration or a warehouse migration applies here, no exemption because the letters "AI" are involved.

"We're doing AI" is not a goal. It's a mood, and sometimes it borders on something faintly cultish. Enthusiasm doesn't quite cover it. Conviction? Faith? There isn't a clean word for the certainty of a leadership team that has decided AI is the answer before anyone's said what the question is.

If you can't finish the sentence "we're deploying AI to _____," you're not ready to buy anything. Fill in the blank first. Reduce average handle time by 20 percent. Cut onboarding from three weeks to one. Deflect 40 percent of tier-one tickets. Those are goals. You can measure them, hit them, or miss them. You can tell whether the money was worth it.

Buy AI without one, and you've bought a solution in search of a problem, at full price, during a hype cycle.