Stop sending me engineers: what OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft misread about enterprise AI

The AI industry says enterprises can't absorb AI. Its answer is to absorb it for them. That's not the same thing. The engineer across the table knew the model cold. Not vendor-deck cold. He could tell me where it would break, what it would cost, and which benchmark numbers to ignore. One of the better technical minds who has ever sat in that chair. Forty minutes in, I asked which of our problems he would point to first. He named a minor workflow one of my directors had mentioned that morning. The easy read is that he didn't know my business. True, and not very interesting. Here is the real issue: the people who sent him are making the exact mistake they are being paid to fix.