Food distributor paid $50k upfront for AI automation that deleted its own data
adrianscottcom · x · 2026-09-11
A postmortem of a failed engagement: a 2,000-person food distributor paid an AI agency $50k upfront plus $5k/month to automate trend, pricing and competitor tracking—a job 150 employees did 2-4 hours a day.
The agency built scrapers for only 10 of 50+ target sites; every new scrape overwrote the last, employee corrections vanished, and there was no history, forecasting, or quarterly comparison. The "data warehouse" was a poorly configured database, and the retainer covered maintenance only, not the remaining 40 sites.
Leadership nodded through the demo while the agency congratulated itself. The lesson: AI agencies often extract the easy part of a workflow, destroy institutional memory, and bill you for the privilege.
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