When I sold my commercial tree company after 20 years, I knew exactly what every piece of equipment cost, what every crew member produced, and what every job was worth. I measured everything, because in that business, waste will kill you.
Then I walked into the AI world. And I couldn't believe what I saw.
Smart business owners (people running $5M, $10M, $20M companies) had been sold a vision. Slick demos. Impressive decks. AI tools that were going to transform their operations. They bought in. They wrote the checks. And then nothing actually worked the way the salesperson promised.
What they got was AI Theater. The appearance of transformation without the results. Tools that looked powerful in a demo but sat half-configured in production. Subscriptions that auto-renewed while nobody remembered signing up. Automation systems that didn't talk to each other. Like hiring 12 employees who refuse to communicate. Five thousand dollars a month. Ten thousand. Sometimes more. Just gone. And getting worse every month.
But here's what nobody talks about: the cost that doesn't show up on any invoice.
The employees assigned to "figure out the AI stuff" were jumping between 6 different tools that didn't share data, re-entering the same information by hand three times a day, building manual workarounds for systems that were supposed to run automatically. 6 to 12 hours per employee per week, every week, just keeping broken AI systems from collapsing entirely.
Nobody called it cognitive drain. They just called it burnout. Your best people (the ones capable of doing your highest-value work) were being slowly ground down by the friction of tools that were supposed to make their jobs easier. Morale drops. Turnover rises. And every exit interview says something vague about "the environment." Nobody connects it to the AI stack. But I do.
The difference between AI Theater and AI Optimization isn't the tools you buy. It's whether those tools actually talk to each other, actually get used, and actually eliminate work instead of creating it. Nobody's ever shown you what real optimization looks like. That's the gap StackTriage exists to close.
That's when I built StackTriage. Not to sell you anything. Not to pitch you a retainer. To show you the number. Your number. The exact dollar amount disappearing from your AI budget every single month while you're busy running your business.
Ten minutes. No credit card. Your call, not mine. Just your number.
