The Budget Gateway

Some AI initiatives never fail loudly. They simply remain promising. Each quarter brings a new demo, a new model version, a new explanation of why results will arrive after the next round of funding. No single request is unreasonable, yet the cumulative spend grows while the evidence stays thin. This is the "forever promising" algorithm, and the usual defense against it, personal skepticism from a CFO, does not scale. A mechanism does. This topic describes the budget gateway: a structure in which funding for each stage is released only when pre-agreed metrics are met on data the team has not been tuning against.…