A data pipeline stripped minus signs from loan amounts, turning a net $784,000 into $5.3 million in debt, with multiple models validating this incorrect result. Hrishi Olickel, founder of Southbridge AI, used this failure at the October 2026 AI Engineer conference to illustrate his core argument: the final bottleneck in data transformation—intelligence and judgment—is now cheaply accessible, but the true difficulty lies in not knowing what information means until a decision is made.
Olickel posits that every data record is constrained by four modes. Using temperature as an example: the source mode determines whether you have a regional phone reading, a desk sensor measurement, or a watch reading; the storage mode limits what can be recorded—device firmware may be omitted, and recording a timestamp to the second might take longer than writing the record itself; the decision mode determines which omissions are fatal—assessing comfort requires multiple measurements throughout the day and confirmation of the measurer, while weather mapping cares about location and device changes, and installing sensitive equipment requires excluding the person as noise. The fourth mode is the model's prior, its belief about how the world 'should be.' These four modes are only simultaneously known when the decision actually occurs. He cited the term 'customer': for billing, it is the payer; for support, the caller; for compliance, the entity the organization is responsible for. A unified customer box cannot resolve these distinctions before the question is asked.
His alternative is a 'just-in-time ontology': building transformation structures when the decision is known, preserving their context and evidence for reuse. Operationally, he splits data work into three model roles. Designers decompose problems, write specifications, and authorize budgets, suited to slower, heavier reasoning models. Executors read PDFs, write database records, and check results within pipelines, suited to cheap, fast models with predictable defects. Optimizers start from a working run, try alternatives, debug, take notes, and adjust budgets to limit exposure, requiring reusable knowledge and stable execution environments. This separation explains why a new executor model could enter the Ohio pipeline without taking over its design—the system can test where the model helps while leaving specification and optimization to models suited for those tasks.
The Ohio campaign finance entity resolution project provided concrete figures. Olickel reported that the project was originally expected to cost about $10,000; after introducing a new decision model, the team completed all donor cases in ten days for under $800. The statewide job cost $795, with the first answer costing $128, while second opinions, disagreement resolution, and auditing totaled $545—checking costs were roughly four times the answering cost. On approximately 200 held-out families, a cheap reasoning model alone achieved results comparable to a comparison model at about 2% of its cost. A key finding was that a decision-first approach correctly answered core questions but missed nine household links because it confidently answered 'no' to each association. The team did not change models or thresholds but rewrote the household question to clarify 'what counts as sufficient evidence,' causing thirteen development questions to shift from no to yes. This demonstrated that definitions themselves can change results without changing the model.