R&D built an AI chatbot for an undefined reason

“It's just an Excel replacement.”— Finance Business Partner

Reason:

Officially because the architecture diagram contains a box labelled "magic". Built in 51 minutes and demonstrated immediately afterwards.

Built by:

Elena, a recruiter

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

an AI agent with shell access

Database:

an API that returns CSV

Authentication:

the API key is shared with three vendors and one intern

Deployment:

deployed into production because staging was broken

Responsible:

IT, according to Finance

Documentation:

a Notion page with one sentence and 19 empty headings

Security situation:

the admin account is also the service account

Future disaster:

It will get a support rota before it gets an owner.

Age: 4.7 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 55 users, 2 accidental connections, alive 19x longer than intended.