Meet the 'Doing More AI Than You' CTO: 90% of enterprise AI projects stall as theater
DavidLinthicum · x · 2026-10-09
David Linthicum satirizes a new enterprise persona: the "I'm Doing More AI Than You Are" CTO, who measures success in tokens burned per day and agent swarms per sprint rather than revenue, productivity, or customer value.
Key points:
- The uniform: AI summit quarter-zips, vendor swag, an "AI Transformation Roadmap FINAL v9" deck, and seventeen vendor-hosted "AI innovation retreats" a year — dinners and gifts that would trigger compliance review for anyone else.
- The reality: 90% of AI projects are stalled or abandoned. Chatbots give wrong answers, agent swarms generate 9,000 Jira tickets, an AI finance assistant categorizes cloud spend as "office snacks," and a tired business analyst named Karen quietly does the real work.
- The survival skill: rebranding failure as learning velocity — failed pilots become "market signal discovery," blown budgets become "strategic capability investment," zero adoption becomes "early-stage behavioral resistance." Boards buy it.
- The takeaway: AI leadership is measured by business outcomes (revenue, productivity, risk reduction, operational efficiency), not tokens burned. If your strategy has more pilots than Southwest Airlines and more agent swarms than users, you may just be doing AI theater with better snacks.
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