Have you ever lost your bag after a flight? That sinking feeling as the carousel empties and yours never comes.
In that moment it’s the worst thing in the world. The holiday’s ruined before it’s begun.
Someone, somewhere, has failed you.
A few years ago I was talking to someone who runs operations at British Airways. They walked me through what it actually takes for that same flight to work. Every part on the aircraft functioning perfectly. The fuel, the oil, the tyres, all correct. The plane airworthy enough to take off and, more importantly, to land. Then two hundred passengers gathered in one place, boarded, in the right seats. Then the crew there too, on time, even when one of them wakes up sick. And then you do that whole miracle again. Several hundred times a day.
Nobody ever talks about the planes that land. We only talk about the one that doesn’t. And out of that entire, improbable, invisible act of everything going right, the one thing we notice is the single bag that went missing.
That’s how we’re wired. We see the failure in high definition. We are completely blind to the ten thousand quiet preventions holding the whole thing up. And here’s the uncomfortable evidence. Only five percent of organisations do proactive prevention at all. Ninety five percent are standing at the carousel, waiting to be angry.
Then, two days later, the bag turns up on your doorstep. And you’re flooded with gratitude for the driver who hands it over. You thank them for the miracle of it. But that driver is just the face on the recovery. Behind them sat another thousand things that had to go right. The tracing, the routing, the flights back, the depot, perhaps even the insurance claim. You thank the one person you can see, and stay blind to the machine that actually did the work.
This is the trap waiting for AI. Its real prize isn’t doing the visible work faster. It’s the invisible save. The outage that never happens. The fraud that’s stopped before it starts. The bag that never goes missing, and the bag that quietly finds its way home.
We curse the bag that’s lost and thank the hands that return it. We never once think about the system that did both. That’s exactly where AI is going to live. And exactly why we’ll forget to thank it.