· By Ricardo Torres Oliva
Authority does not announce itself
Why noise about artificial intelligence is the most reliable signal that someone has not implemented it.
There is a quick way to tell whether someone has implemented artificial intelligence in a real operation: listen to them for thirty seconds.
Whoever has done it talks about data that was in worse shape than the inventory claimed. About permissions. About the person on the team who held the whole process in their head and whom nobody had documented. About the week it had to be switched off and rolled back. They talk about governance, traceability, and what happens when the system gets it wrong at three in the morning.
Whoever has not talks about revolution.
Why it happens
It is not bad faith. The two conversations belong to different moments of a project. Enthusiasm lives in the phase where everything is still possible because nothing has been touched; detail shows up in month four, when the pilot worked and the rollout is not moving.
The problem for whoever decides is that both sound equally confident. And the one that sounds better is, without fail, the one that has touched the system least.
What to do with it
It is a cheap heuristic and it works in a meeting: ask what went wrong.
Not "what results did you get?", which has a prepared answer. Ask what they had to undo, what they underestimated, and what they would do differently. Whoever has been inside answers in thirty seconds and in detail. Whoever has not changes the subject towards potential.
It is the same discipline as Destrucción Creativa: what has to stop explains more than what has to start. In a sales conversation too.