The AI Theatre Checklist.

10 signs your AI rollout is theatre

1. 1. You can measure the activity, but not the result.Licences bought, prompts written, workshops run. But nobody can point to a workflow that takes less time or a decision that got better.
2. 2. You have lots of pilots and demos, but nothing in production.Pilots are cheap applause. Production means real work, real data, real consequences, and someone accountable when it breaks.
3. 3. Everyone works on their own.Fifty people quietly using AI fifty different ways is not adoption. It is fifty unshared experiments with no compounding value.
4. 4. There is no shared store of knowledge.Every task starts from a blank prompt. Your standards, examples and decisions live in people's heads, so the AI never gets smarter about your business.
5. 5. No one checks the output.Work goes straight from the model into an email, a report or a decision. That is not efficiency. That is unreviewed risk with a nicer font.
6. 6. You cannot say what good looks like.If there is no definition of a good output, the AI cannot be tested against it, and neither can the person approving it.
7. 7. The work did not go away. It moved.The report writes itself now, but someone spends an hour fixing it. The total effort is the same; it just changed desks.
8. 8. You bought the tool before you understood the job.The licence came first and the use case is still being hunted. That is a solution in search of a problem, at enterprise pricing.
9. 9. AI sits away from the people who have the problem.An innovation team owns the AI while the operations team owns the pain. The distance between them is where value dies.
10. 10. No one can explain, or stand behind, what the AI did.When a customer, auditor or regulator asks why, 'the model said so' is not an answer anyone can sign their name to.