Secondary Concerns, Primary Mistakes

Here's a funny thing that happens when multiple stakeholders are involved in a purchasing decision. There's an overarching goal—solving a problem, enabling a capability. Then there's a list of nice-to-haves, ways to weigh options against each other. Users want low friction and easy onboarding. Finance wants low cost. IT wants low maintenance burden.

What I've seen happen: the secondary desires override the primary goal. No matter how well a solution satisfies the nice-to-haves, if it doesn't move the needle on the actual goal, it shouldn't be in the running.

With AI initiatives this takes forms like:

• Choosing a "free" open-source model to avoid per-token costs, even though it hallucinates too often to actually automate the target workflow

• Going with on-premise deployment to satisfy security requirements, when the on-premise version lacks the capabilities that made the cloud version worth considering

• IT insisting on the enterprise vendor with a support contract, even though the team's pilot showed it handles their edge cases half as well as the scrappier alternative

These concerns—cost, security, maintainability—aren't invalid. They're just not primary.