Then what

“Then what” is the two-word question that stops a doomed AI project cold: the AI wrote the thing — then what? Where does it go, who picks it up, what happens next, and does that next step exist? Output has to enter a real process, get used by a real person, or trigger a real next move — or it’s just very expensive exhaust.

Why it matters: People lock onto the AI step — the impressive step, the demo step — and forget the output has to land somewhere. This is bigger than “keep a human in the loop”: it’s the whole loop, how one new piece fits the tools, people, and handoffs you already have. The canonical failure is the beautiful system generating reports nobody asked for, on a schedule nobody checked, into a folder nobody opened — flawless execution of a shrug.