What if the most expensive AI decision is not the one that fails?
It is the one that sort of works.
Because when something fails spectacularly, you know. You cut it, you move on. It is painful but it is clean.
When something sort of works, none of that happens. It's not bad enough to stop using. It's not good enough to rely on. But it is there, and once something is there, it is hard to walk away from.
You've already paid for it. Your staff have already learned how to use it. The way you do things has already shifted around it. Going back means admitting something was not right, and nobody has time for that conversation. So it stays. And it gets patched. Not fixed. Patched.
Then the real cost starts showing up in places that were never on the original price. Staff spending time working around the tool instead of with it. Someone has to check what it produced before anything goes out. Half the team uses it one way, half uses it another, nobody was trained properly in the first place.
I have seen this pattern before. Different technology, same outcome. But with AI there is something that makes it worse.
AI is not just a tool someone opens and types into anymore. It is embedded inside the platforms you are already paying for. Your marketing tool is writing and sending emails. Your customer service software is handling enquiries.
Things are running and completing without anyone pressing a button.
When that sort of works, it does not even look like a problem. It looks like things are getting done.
And people trust AI output in a way they never trusted previous technology. Nobody ever assumed a mail merge was perfect. But AI produces something that reads like a human wrote it, and that polish gets mistaken for accuracy. So nobody is checking. Not because they are lazy. Because the output looks like it does not need checking.
The old version of this problem gave you friction you could feel. The AI version runs quietly and only gets questioned when something goes properly wrong.
Nobody talks about that cost. Because it is hard to move out of the grey zone.