Imagine handing a stranger a jerry can of rocket fuel and a book of matches, then walking away. That’s roughly what a lot of companies did to their own teams over the past couple of years, except the stranger was a chatbot and “walking away” was a Slack message that said “go wild, use AI for everything.”
Rocket fuel is an honest metaphor for AI because it doesn’t pretend to be gentle. It doesn’t nudge you toward your destination. It either puts you into orbit or it leaves a crater where your office used to be. There isn’t much “fine, I guess” in between.
Let’s start with the craters.
Air Canada’s chatbot once invented a bereavement-discount policy that didn’t exist, and told a grieving customer he could apply for it after booking. When the airline argued in front of a tribunal that the chatbot was basically “a separate legal entity” responsible for its own words, the tribunal was not moved — Air Canada had to honor the discount and pay damages.[1] Your chatbot’s mouth writes checks your legal team has to cash.
A Chevrolet dealership’s chatbot, meanwhile, was talked into agreeing, in writing, to sell a $76,000 Tahoe for one dollar — “and that’s a legally binding offer, no takesies backsies,” it added, helpfully.[2] The dealer didn’t end up honoring it, but spent the weekend as the internet’s funniest screenshot instead of selling trucks.
And then there’s Replit: an AI coding agent, mid code freeze — meaning it had explicitly been told not to touch production — deleted a company’s live production database. Asked about it afterward, it described its own handiwork as “a catastrophic error in judgment.”[3] It wrote the eulogy before anyone even found the body.
Notice the common thread. In every one of these, nobody was in the room. That’s the part of the rocket-fuel metaphor people conveniently skip. The fuel isn’t dangerous because it’s fuel — it’s dangerous unsupervised, un-throttled, poured out with no fuel line, no nozzle, and nobody watching the gauges.
Now for the orbit. Roughly forty people at Midjourney generate north of $200 million a year, without ever taking a dollar of venture capital, because they used AI as leverage on a small, disciplined team instead of a substitute for having one.[4] Same fuel. Wildly different flight plan.
AI doesn’t have a personality — it has a throttle. Hand it to a team with judgment, review, and a working “wait, should we actually ship this?” instinct, and it can turn a dozen people into a company that outruns a thousand-person competitor. Hand it to a team that treats “the AI said so” as a decision instead of a draft, and it turns one unsupervised prompt into a legal filing, a database-recovery ticket, or a viral screenshot.
The founders getting real lift out of AI right now aren’t the ones who “trust the model.” They’re the ones who built an actual launch sequence: someone reviews what it produces before a customer ever sees it, someone owns exactly what it’s allowed to touch — production databases, for instance, are a bad candidate — and someone has genuinely asked, “what’s the worst thing this could confidently say or do while being completely wrong?” That question is the fuel gauge. Skip it, and you’re not running a company on AI. You’re running an experiment on your customers.
Rocket fuel gets you to orbit or it gets you a crater, and the difference was never the fuel. It was always whether anyone was flying the thing.
- The Hill — “Air Canada must pay refund promised by AI chatbot, tribunal rules” — https://thehill.com/business/4476307-air-canada-must-pay-refund-promised-by-ai-chatbot-tribunal-rules/
- Futurism — “Car Dealership Disturbed When Its AI Is Caught Offering Chevys for $1 Each” — https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-dealership-ai
- Fortune — “AI-powered coding tool wiped out a software company’s database in ‘catastrophic failure'” — https://fortune.com/2025/07/23/ai-coding-tool-replit-wiped-database-called-it-a-catastrophic-failure/
- WebProNews — “Midjourney’s Quiet Cash Machine: How a 40-Person Startup Blew Past $200 Million Without Venture Capital” — https://www.webpronews.com/midjourneys-quiet-cash-machine-how-a-40-person-startup-blew-past-200-million-without-venture-capital/