Author: Warren Olivier

Somewhere in a South African head office this quarter, an AI proof-of-concept that impressed the executive committee six months ago is being switched off or shelved. It demoed beautifully, but it never made it into production. And the post-mortem will probably blame the model, the vendor, the hype or even AI technology itself. That instinct is almost always wrong. When an enterprise AI project fails, it is rarely the intelligence that lets you down. The core of the problem is that it is far easier to build a controlled, impressive demo than it is to scale it into production software.…