I have sat on almost every side of the AI table.
Executive. Vendor. Adviser.
The vocabulary changes. The incentives do not.
Projects enter easily. They almost never leave.
Your AI portfolio is a pressure vessel. Every quarter, someone pumps in another pilot, platform, use case, workstream or strategic option. Attention fragments. Accountability thins out. The same scarce people appear on every project plan.
Then everyone wonders why activity rises while impact stays flat.
Rational behavior by honest people can still produce an irrational portfolio.
Four forces keep the vessel filling
Executives preserve optionality.
When nobody knows which capability will matter next year, ten pilots can look more prudent than two commitments. Every project buys a little political safety. It shows movement, protects a sponsor and postpones the moment when leadership must choose one future over another.
Keeping an option open still consumes money, data, engineering time, management attention and trust. Without an expiry date, it postpones the decision to commit or stop.
Vendors expand their footprint.
Many vendors care about your outcome. Their commercial systems usually measure seats, usage, workloads and products inside your architecture. A demo shows what the technology can do. Portfolio governance decides whether this is one of the few capabilities your company should commit to owning.
The tension comes from incentives. Your governance must make the portfolio decision.
Internal teams protect relevance.
An initiative creates a sponsor, budget, team and story about why the work matters. Stopping it threatens all four. Sunk cost becomes identity. Activity becomes proof of importance. A weak project develops a strong immune system.
Most governance assigns responsibility for starting. Far less of it rewards someone for releasing people and money from work that no longer deserves them.
Advisers can benefit from scope.
More analysis, workstreams, specialists and programme time can be defensible. They can also increase fees. Engagement design must account for both the value of added scope and the adviser's financial incentive.
Some advisers argue for concentration. McKinsey's 2026 AI Transformation Manifesto recommends focusing on one to three business domains and describes substantial, stage-gated investment. That is useful counterevidence to the lazy claim that every large consultancy always wants more.
A methodology and a commercial model are still different things. When fees rise with people, weeks and scope, subtraction has to survive the contract. Pay for decisions, transferred capability and outcomes where you can. Make a smaller answer commercially possible.
The missing job
Most AI portfolios have sponsors, architects, product owners, programme managers, risk leads and steering committees.
Who owns the kill decision?
I do not mean the person allowed to stop a project after six red reports. Who is expected to remove work before failure becomes undeniable?
That role is often empty.
Funding every experiment spreads talent too thin to redesign a critical workflow or create clear accountability. Concentration requires some initiatives to end.
Focused portfolios require leaders to disappoint sponsors whose work no longer earns scarce resources.
Install a relief valve
Boards make subtraction legitimate by setting decision rules and backing the leaders who stop work. They can leave individual model selection to the operating teams.
Every material AI initiative should face the same Subtraction Test:
- Result: What economic or operational result changes if this succeeds?
- Fit: Which one of our few strategic domains does it serve?
- Evidence: What evidence, by what date, earns the next round of funding?
- Trade-off: What existing work will stop or move so this receives real people and money?
- Authority: Who has the mandate, incentive and date to kill it?
Vague answers leave the initiative as an option, without the people and money required for a strategic commitment.
The fifth question changes the system. It turns stopping into a designed outcome rather than a career-ending admission.
Set the criteria before the demo, before the favourite vendor and before the sponsor falls in love. Give every initiative an evidence date. At that point, leadership must commit, deliberately postpone, reclassify or stop.
The criteria should fit the business. A universal financial threshold or timetable to production creates false precision. A regulated core process and an internal productivity tool should not fight under identical rules. They should face the same demand for an explicit result, evidence, trade-off and owner.
Judge the kill owner by the quality of reallocation. A high body count creates a new distortion. Did scarce talent move to the bets that matter? Did decision time fall? Did the selected business result improve?
Stopping weak work releases the resources needed for the remaining bets.
Ask what should no longer exist
At the next portfolio review, ask what started, what shipped and what changed in the business.
Then ask what should no longer exist.
Name the force keeping it alive. Optionality. Commercial expansion. Internal identity. Advisory scope. Perhaps the evidence genuinely improved. Make the reason visible.
The goal is a concentrated portfolio where every bet has weight, an owner, an economic purpose and a reason to survive its next evidence date.
Assign the authority and incentive to stop alongside the courage and funding to start.
If that person is nobody, you already know why the pressure keeps rising.
The instrument: AI Project Kill Scorecard. One page, fillable, free with your email.
Your move.