Lessons from the Field: What Goes Wrong with AI Promotion Systems Two quarters into our AI-powered dealer incentive platform, we faced a crisis. The system recommended aggressive discounts on our flagship SUV right as a competitor announced a major recall—creating a golden opportunity we would have missed with the AI's "optimal" strategy. This wake-up call reminded us that even sophisticated machine learning models can fail spectacularly without proper governance, domain expertise integration, and human oversight. Here are the critical mistakes we made (and fixed) implementing AI for trade promotions. The promise of AI Trade Promotion Strategies is compelling: optimize dealer incentives, predict promotion effectiveness, and maximize ROI across complex multi-regional campaigns. But the path from proof-of-concept to production-grade system is littered with obstacles that derail even technically sound implementations.…