Every Tuesday

Failures

In most of these cases the technology worked. That is the finding, not the caveat. Fifty-two case files, each answering one question: what structural condition made this fail, and how would a buyer have detected it before spending.

Published report

All research

FailuresGAIF-FA-001

The model was not the problem.

A cancer centre spent USD 62.1 million on a decision support system that never reached a decision.

September 202615 pagesv1.0Read →

1 published

52 scheduled in total

Failures8 Sep 2026

IBM Watson for Oncology at MD Anderson

Read now →Tuesday

The six modes

One primary mode per case

Mode	Name	What it means
1	No workflow	The system functioned and was never wired to the moment a human decides. Output arrives beside the decision rather than inside it.
2	No data path	The system cannot reach the data it needs from inside the institution, so humans carry the data to it by hand.
3	No owner	No named person is accountable for the decision the system was built to change, so no one can authorise the change in practice.
4	Wrong bottleneck	Visibility, prestige or ambition selected the use case rather than a measured constraint. The system solves something that was not costing anything.
5	No baseline	Nobody measured what the humans did before, so improvement can never be demonstrated and the programme is defended on anecdote.
6	No stop condition	No agreed circumstance under which the programme would be halted, so it is extended instead of judged.

The modes describe structure rather than technology, which is why they survive changes in the technology. The primary mode is the one whose removal would have changed the outcome.

The calendar

51 scheduled

Failures

Published report

The model was not the problem.

1 published

IBM Watson for Oncology at MD Anderson

The six modes

The calendar

The Epic sepsis prediction model

Air Canada and the Moffatt decision

The Optum care management algorithm

McDonald's and IBM at the drive-thru

Zillow Offers

Australia's Robodebt

Amazon's recruiting engine

The Replit agent and the production database

Klarna's customer service reversal

Mata v Avianca

Knight Capital

Chevrolet of Watsonville

The Dutch childcare benefits scandal

COMPAS recidivism scoring

CNET's AI-written finance articles

Microsoft Tay

Michigan MiDAS

DPD's customer service chatbot

Google Gemini image generation

Mobley v Workday

Sports Illustrated and fabricated authors

Detroit facial recognition wrongful arrests

The GPT-4o sycophancy rollback

Rite Aid and the FTC

Six pieces of research a week. One email on Sunday.