Failures
Deployments that were quietly switched off
Abandoned, rolled back, or costing more than they saved. Almost nobody publishes these, which is exactly why we do. One a month, named, with the money.
| Company | What they switched off | Ran for | Cost | Why it ended |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marchetti Grocers | Shelf-scanning robot fleet, 3 stores | 9 months | €1.4M | Could not distinguish a misplaced jar from a customer holding one; staff stopped acting on alerts |
| Northgate Apparel | Autonomous refund agent | 6 weeks | £61,000 | Approved refunds outside policy; no spend ceiling in the tool |
| Trellis Foundry | AI production scheduling, twice | 14 months total | $310,000 | Real constraints lived with the foremen, not in the ERP the model read |
| Aesthetify GmbH (Recklinghausen, Germany) | Website AI chatbot answering patient questions and booking appointments | Live until April 2025; switched off after a 10 April 2025 warning letter, relaunched with a filter | EUR 260 fee plus interest, all court costs, and an order backed by fines of up to EUR 250,000 per breach | It told users the two managing doctors were board-certified specialists; they are not (OLG Hamm, 4 UKl 3/25) |
| Kinney Drugs (New York and Vermont, about 95 stores) | AI voice assistant (Burt, built by Synerio) as the front door for pharmacy refill calls | About three months: May 2026 to early August 2026 | Not disclosed; terms cap liability to a patient at USD 100 | Wrong refill requests, delays and missed notices; no keypad route to a person; consent by default |
Read the post-mortems
Photograph — an older customer on a landline phone at a kitchen table, a row of prescription bottles beside a notepadFailure / RetailKinney Drugs put AI on its pharmacy phones. It lasted three monthsA 95-store pharmacy chain made an AI voice the only way in for refill calls. Patients got wrong refills and delays. The keypad came back in August.Photograph — a laptop on a clinic reception desk with a website chat window open beside an appointment bookFailure / Ways of workingAesthetify's chatbot invented doctors' titles. A court held it liableA German beauty clinic's website bot called its two doctors board-certified surgeons. They are not. The clinic fixed it in days and still lost in court.