Pilot Autopsy #1 — the $342K quote desk that nobody measured
Live teardown · 60 minutes · Free · Recorded
A fictional $185M industrial manufacturer-distributor spent $342,000 and eleven months on an AI quote-desk pilot. The CFO killed it at budget review — and nobody in the room could say whether it had worked, because no baseline was ever signed and no acceptance test was ever written.
The case is synthetic and clean-room. The failure pattern is not: RAND puts AI project failure above 80%, with misdefined problems as the #1 cause; S&P Global found the share of companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives jumped from 17% to 42% in a year. We built this case from that published evidence, beat by beat, with the citations on the slides.
In 60 minutes:
The full case file — what was promised, what was spent, where it died.
The five failure beats, each mapped to the documented real-world cause.
The counterfactual: the one page that would have redirected or killed this pilot ten months earlier.
Yours to keep: the Go/No-Go Decision Record — a one-page template your team can put in front of the next AI proposal before a dollar moves.
Honest limits: what an autopsy can't tell you, and where the failure statistics themselves are contested.
For operators of $50M–$500M manufacturing, distribution, logistics, and industrial-services businesses. No vendor pitch — Tektari's verification line sells no implementation and takes no vendor commissions.
Hosted by the founder of Tektari, who spent his career on audited, $1B+ industrial delivery where an unmeasured number doesn't survive a review meeting.