Get the Demo Theater Detector Checklist

Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027 — not because the tech fails, but because most of what gets shown is demo theater, not a working system. This one-page field guide is the test: the 4 signatures of demo theater (does-everything autonomy, the wrapper with no moat, the notebook that never ships, the agent you hand the keys to), the 4 signatures of what actually works (narrow beats broad, a human in the loop, measured not vibed, bounded verifiable loops), the τ-bench reliability test you can run yourself (run one real task 8× and count the clean successes), and an 8-box scorecard that tells you in 60 seconds whether a project is REAL, FRAGILE, or THEATER. Every claim is backed by a cited source: Gartner, McKinsey, τ-bench (Sierra + Princeton), Google DeepMind, MLflow, Hacker News, and SaaStr.

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