This week, a board will approve an eight-figure AI budget. The evidence: a vendor deck and a thirty-minute demo. I've watched companies buy AI twice. In the nineties it was called expert systems. Now it's called AI agents. Both times they bought it the way they once bought ERP: an answer, before the question. I remember how the first wave ended. The customer said: "My team of experts keeps to schedule and makes fewer errors without your system than with it." The proje