The AI Failure Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Screwing Up Your AI Transformation

Welcome to The AI Failure Handbook – the only AI book you probably shouldn’t forward to your CEO (unless you enjoy watching senior leaders squirm).

While the rest of the industry is busy publishing the same glossy liturgy “10 Steps to AI Success”, “The Responsible AI Framework”, “How We Deployed Generative AI and Saved Millions” (complete with suspiciously precise numbers and suspiciously triumphant slide decks) I decided to do the opposite on purpose.

Instead of another earnest guide to winning, this handbook lovingly catalogues the precise, repeatable, almost beautiful recipes that keep 80–95% of AI initiatives firmly in the “expensive PowerPoint and quiet regret” club. With dark humour, unflinching honesty, and a thoughtfully provocative approach, it shows you exactly how most organisations ensure their multimillion-dollar transformations die quietly in production, often while everyone involved insists they’re “doing AI” brilliantly.

You’ll discover:

• Just Do AI™ and never ask “Why?” because assumptions are faster, far less career-limiting, and 95% of pilots will nod in enthusiastic agreement anyway.
• Governance as performance art how to strangle innovation with 47 overlapping approval layers while solemnly calling it “Responsible AI”.
• Polish the symptoms, preserve the issue why fixing the obvious itches feels so much more productive than ever touching the gory root causes underneath.
• The Technology first strategy the surest way to keep AI safely away from messy things like customers, revenue, and actual value.
• The Co-Head Hydra because nothing screams “speed of AI” like requiring consensus from six busy people before lunch.
• Promise the moon, deliver the PowerPoint how to overhype AI to the board until credibility dies a quiet death in production.
• Measure everything except what matters ROC curves, tokens per second, and other beautiful vanity metrics that let you look extremely busy while value quietly evaporates.
• And the pièce de résistance turning your entire AI “transformation” into a quietly authoritarian nightmare while still calling it “people, culture, and change”.

Inspired by the 1944 OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual, this is reverse psychology with a straight face. It is not another triumphant case study. It is not another framework. It is a satirical mirror held up to every executive, transformation lead, data scientist, governance committee member, and procurement officer who has ever watched multimillion-dollar dreams quietly die in production while updating the roadmap and scheduling another alignment sync.

Read it. Laugh (because if you can’t laugh at corporate AI theatre, you will cry). Wince (because some of it will feel uncomfortably, painfully familiar). And if the humour lands just right, perhaps quietly rethink one or two things before the next budget cycle.

A work of satire by Dr. David R. Hardoon. Any resemblance to actual organisations, transformations, governance committees, or CxOs is entirely coincidental and without merit. Printed in irony.

Perfect for anyone tired of the hype who can still appreciate a good dose of ironic truth and a quiet, subversive cheat code for those brave enough to use it.