Bankrupt by AI

There are two ways to go bankrupt with AI — and both look reasonable from the inside.

One is loud: all in on AI, headcount cut before the workflow is proven, forty pilots and no owner. The other is quiet: "we've always managed without it" — until a competitor automates the boring parts and starts taking your bids. Both ends of the scale are failure zones. The middle is the operating band. Bankrupt by AI keeps both in view.

An instrument, not a comment

At the center is the AI market temperature: a composite of six indicators — from AI mentions in earnings calls to the pilot-to-production rate to automation reversals. Normalized, weighted, condensed into a single number from 0 (frozen) to 100 (overheated), and revised quarterly. Not to predict the market — to make it visible when conviction and evidence drift apart, while the correction is still cheap.

Cases that end with an answer

Every analysis is the anatomy of a real pattern — anonymized, across industries and jurisdictions, drawn from filings, court records and post-mortems. No dunking, no doom: patterns, not people. And every case ends with what would have worked instead.

The playbook

Five tests that separate automation that compounds from automation that corrodes — plus a cooling-down sequence for the overheated and a starting sequence for the frozen. Strategy between the extremes, not at either one.

Who's behind it

Bankrupt by AI is a project by Balane. If you need this read for your own house — separating good automation from bad, setting kill criteria, building an AI capability plan that doesn't bet the company — that's what we do. Not investment advice.

*Currently in development — the first analyses and the monitor go live soon.*