Steve Blank AI slop in business cases - reprice the evidence; provenance over format; unverifiable validation counts for nothing

Steve Blank published a piece this week that should worry anyone who signs off business cases. Blank teaches the Lean LaunchPad course that exported customer discovery to the world, built on a simple discipline: get out of the building, interview real customers and iterate your hypotheses against what you hear. This year, by his own telling, he found students generating that work with AI, from the interviews to the learning to the pivots, producing what he calls AI slop: artefacts that look exactly like evidence and are not. After fifteen years, he has had to redesign the course.

That is his account of his classroom. Here is mine from the business frontline: the same slop is already creeping into investment decisions, and we are treating it as evidence.

Consider what a business case actually contains: customer discovery, market validation, stakeholder consultation. Each of these can now be drafted, summarised or fabricated by a model in an afternoon, and the artefact is indistinguishable from the real thing, because the artefact was never the point. The point was that a human had to go and learn something, and that the learning changed what they believed. A document only proves that learning happened when you can audit it back to raw human interactions; if you cannot, you are holding a prop. Most assurance processes I have seen check the format of the evidence, not its provenance.

The fix, though, is not banning the tools, because that horse has bolted and some of the uses are legitimate. The fix is repricing the evidence. Any claim of demand or stakeholder support that cannot be traced to identifiable human conversations should now count for nothing in an investment decision, not discounted but nothing, and boards that keep accepting unverifiable validation are funding fiction with a good template.

So the question I would put to anyone who approves spend is this: which line in the last business case you approved could you audit back to a real conversation, and how do you know?

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