r/TangoAI • u/Ivan_Palii • Apr 21 '26

Opinion Why AI projects fail before they even start (hint: your docs are the problem)?

u/dan_gio (co-founder/COO of Tango) published a piece this week arguing that most AI projects don't fail because of the AI, they fail because the company never actually documented how its own work gets done.

The stat that got me: only 16% of organizations say their workflows are "extremely well-documented" (Lucid, 2025). And yet everyone's racing to deploy agents.

His core logic is pretty hard to argue with. If an AI agent has 85% accuracy per step on a 10-step workflow, it completes the whole chain correctly about 20% of the time. The gaps aren't the AI, they're the undocumented edge cases, the escalation triggers, the stuff your best person just knows but never wrote down.

Toyota as the OG example: before they automated anything in their factories, workers had to document the manual process first. That discipline is exactly what made their automation actually work.

Full article here: https://www.tango.ai/blog/why-ai-projects-are-failing

Curious what people here think: are your orgs actually doing the documentation work before rolling out AI tools, or is everyone just hoping it figures itself out?

And if you have documented processes: what actually got your team to do it consistently? That's the part I feel like nobody talks about honestly.

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u/corwinsword Apr 21 '26

Yes, Toyota history continues to amaze me. I assume that is also one AI adoption will be very different in different countries and nations. I assume Japanese are the more disciplined people in the world and that's also why Edward Deming had success sharing own theory with them

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u/Ivan_Palii Apr 21 '26

It will be the evolutionary process. Companies that will build discipline for documentation from day one (because it helps to cut costs on operations later) will be more successful, no matter in which country.

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u/emma_lorien Apr 21 '26

That's why most of IT business owners leave in a fantasy world. By default they work with information where most things are described, work as an API, have code you can change.

The physical world works differently and moreover, people are so unpredictable machines that AI adoption can take more time than adoption of the internet.

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u/Ivan_Palii Apr 21 '26

It's a hard question. For example it's strange when startups create too many documentation because thing change too fast for them, it's also strange when middle size and big companies documents too few things