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title: The $180,000 dispatch system and the question about month five
author: Giacomo Balli
published: 2026-08-06
url: https://BigBalli.com/blog/the-180000-dispatch-system-and-the-question-about-month-five
tags: AI, Engineering, Product, Reading
---

# The $180,000 dispatch system and the question about month five

*By Giacomo Balli* | *Published: August 6, 2026*

"The $180,000 dispatch system will take four months. Before AI it would have been nine."

Fine. Ask what happens in month five.

Your 40 dispatchers still have to learn a screen they did not ask for, while orders keep coming. Accounting runs parallel for a cycle before anyone trusts the numbers. The two people who actually know how the old system handles exceptions are the bottleneck, and they are not on the vendor's schedule.

The build got faster. The absorption did not.

What they compressed is their own work. Your side starts the day it goes live, and it moves at the speed of people changing habits, which has not sped up the way software production has.

There is one case where the saving is real. When the thing on the other end is another system rather than a person, nobody has to be persuaded to use it. An integration that pushes orders into your ERP needs someone watching the failures, but it needs no floor of people changing how they work.

So go through the proposal and mark every deliverable a human has to learn.

Then ask how many weeks of that schedule are yours rather than theirs. If training is one week at the end, you are reading their timeline.

[Discuss on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7503469773742264321)

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**Tags:** AI, Engineering, Product, Reading

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