The Uncanny Valley Of Enterprise AI Is Bigger Than You Think

InnovationThe Uncanny Valley Of Enterprise AI Is Bigger Than You ThinkByPraful Saklani,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 01, 2026, 11:00am EDTPraful Saklani is CEO of Pramata, a leading contract intelligence platform. getty​Drop 10 contracts into your favorite AI tool. Ask it to summarize them, flag the risks and tell you how to negotiate. In about two minutes, you’ll get back something that looks spectacular. Clean graphs, confident language, perfectly structured output.Now look closer. It cited the wrong termination clause, the pricing analysis confused two counterparties and the “risk” it flagged actually says the exact opposite of what it claimed.Welcome to the uncanny valley of enterprise AI.Three Thresholds To Vet AIThe concept of the uncanny valley stems from that eerie feeling people got from seeing early robots that felt too humanlike. The robots that looked highly realistic but fell short, leaving an unnatural sensation that they could not be trusted.Enterprise AI has its own version of this uncanny valley concept. The outputs look polished and authoritative until you peel back the top layer and realize there isn’t much substance.Through years of working with AI tools, I’ve developed a three-threshold framework to vet outputs and verify results. The bad news is that most AI only clears the first one:1. The Demo Threshold: Is this theoretically interesting? Nearly all AI clears this bar. Demos are impressive and get people excited in the boardroom.​2. The Usefulness Threshold: Will this actually save me time, or will I spend more time fixing its outputs than doing the work myself?​ if (!window.cnxel) { window.cnxel = {}; window.cnxel.cmd = []; var iframe = document.createElement('iframe'); iframe.style.display = 'none'; iframe.onload = function() { var iframeDoc = iframe.contentWindow.document;...