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A consultant closing out a healthcare technology conference in Singapore told the room something almost no vendor ever volunteers: his own employer, the group that runs Changi Airport, throws away more than six out of every ten AI projects it starts. Not after launch. Before one.
Every applied-AI story usually gets told around what shipped. This one is about what got killed on purpose, and that turns out to be the more useful story.
In this episode, Stephen Forte covers:
- Why Changi Airport Group's discard rate is not a confession: the ideas that survive land on real, working infrastructure the team spent years building, including custom-built agents and reusable technical plumbing, so killing an idea costs almost nothing instead of a career.
- The method behind the discipline: working backwards from the customer's journey before choosing a single tool, "customer over the product," the opposite order from how most AI pilots actually get built.
- Two analogies that reframe the number: a pharmaceutical industry that filters hard before anything reaches a patient, and a pilot's "go-around," the decision to abandon a landing and circle back, one of the most important judgments in the entire flight.
- The mirror for your own team: not what has AI done for us lately, but what have you refused to ship, and can anyone tell you why. Most companies do not have a kill rate. They have a hope rate.
- Why this travels past an airport: a hospital group in Nairobi, a logistics operator in Rotterdam, a retailer in Sao Paulo all carry the same shape of problem, and none of them needs an airport's budget to copy the actual behavior.
Sources:
- Healthcare IT News, "Major Singaporean airport group offers healthcare lessons on agentic AI," by Adam Ang, 1 September 2026. All quotes and figures are from this reporting, read in full.
The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.
