Author: Kevin

AI After the Demo — Part 10 The dashboard was beautiful. Green everywhere. 99.9% availability. Response times under two seconds. User satisfaction at 94%. Thousands of questions answered. The AI team was thrilled. Management was impressed. Someone probably put the dashboard in PowerPoint. Then Jeannine asked a question. “How do we know the answers are…

We did it. We found the undocumented process. We interviewed the people doing the work. We traced the spreadsheets. We identified the scheduled jobs. We even figured out why Bob’s stored procedure from 2014 was still running. The business reviewed everything. The process owner approved it. We published the documentation. Someone probably scheduled a meeting…

Your AI found the process. That’s great. Nobody else knew it existed. That’s less good. There wasn’t a process document. There wasn’t a diagram. There wasn’t a runbook. There wasn’t even a particularly useful comment in the code. There was just: A spreadsheet. Three emails. A scheduled job. A stored procedure. A shared folder. And…

Great news. People are using your AI. Not just the project team. Not just the executives who watched the demo. Actual employees. They like it. They’re asking questions. They’re coming back. They’re telling other people about it. Usage is growing every week. Congratulations. This is exactly what you wanted. There is just one small problem.…

Your AI assistant was useful. It answered questions. It summarized documents. It searched company data. It helped users understand what was happening. Then somebody had an idea. “Could we just let it fix the problem?” And with that one sentence, your AI stopped being an assistant. It became a production user. Welcome back to Production.…

Your AI found the company policy. It summarized it perfectly. It cited the source. It gave the user a clear, confident answer. There is just one problem. Nobody ever approved that policy. It was a draft. Someone proposed it. People reviewed it. Comments were added. Maybe Legal looked at it. Maybe Finance discussed it. Then…

Your AI didn’t hack anything. It didn’t bypass authentication. It didn’t exploit a vulnerability. It didn’t steal credentials. Every permission check succeeded. And somehow it still showed someone information they probably shouldn’t have seen. Welcome to one of the more interesting problems with production AI. Because sometimes the biggest AI security problem isn’t that your…

Eventually, your AI is going to be wrong. Not necessarily because it hallucinated. Not necessarily because the model failed. It might have used stale data. It might have retrieved the wrong document. It might have followed an outdated business rule. It might have encountered conflicting definitions. It might have correctly interpreted information that was simply…

Your AI pilot had beautiful data. Of course it did. Someone picked the right tables. Someone selected the right columns. Someone cleaned up the duplicates. Someone explained what the important fields meant. Someone made sure the demo questions had enough context to produce useful answers. And then the AI worked. Wonderful. Now connect it to…

Congratulations. Your AI pilot worked. The demo went beautifully. The executives asked questions. The AI produced impressive answers. Someone nodded approvingly. Someone else started talking about how quickly this could be rolled out across the organization. Maybe somebody even used the word transformational. Wonderful. Now give it to actual users and see what happens. Because building…