The 12 Questions I Run Before I Let Any Team Build an AI Feature Most failed AI projects don't fail at implementation. They fail before a single line of code gets written, when somebody answers "should we?" with "everyone else is." I run an audit before any AI build kicks off — for my own work, and (when people pay me to) for theirs. It's twelve questions. None of them are technical. By question 8 most people have already changed what they want to build, and by question 12 about a third have decided not to build anything at all. That's the point. Here's the full list, what each question is actually testing for, and the failure mode it catches. 1. What's the manual version of this workflow today? If nobody can describe the manual version end-to-end, the AI version will be a hallucinated process pretending to be a product. You can't automate something you can't draw on a whiteboard. Failure caught: Building automation for an imagined workflow nobody actually performs. 2.…