What AI cannot do — the four failure modes that cost real money

The problem

A consultant sends a client deck with a market size figure and a cited report. The report does not exist. A finance executive pastes an AI margin calculation into a board pack; the arithmetic is wrong in the third decimal place and then compounds.

What you need

Question: What are the current referral fee percentages for selling apparel on Amazon India, and what margin should I plan for? Context: D2C kurta brand, average selling price ₹899, we are new to Amazon.

The tool

Perplexity, or ChatGPT/Gemini with browsing enabled

The prompt

What comes back

[TIME-SENSITIVE] Apparel referral fees on Amazon.in are tiered by price band and sub-category. For apparel around ₹899 the rate has historically fallen in the mid-single-digit to low-teens percentage range depending on sub-category.

Verify before you use it

• The referral percentage is [TIME-SENSITIVE] — go to Seller Central's fee schedule or the SMEMinds Amazon Profitability AI tool, which runs on the current fee tables, and use that figure instead.
• The return rate is an [ASSUMPTION] from industry averages. Your own returns data, once you have three months of it, will be materially different.
• Every margin number is calculated, not copied. Recompute it in the calculator with your real landed cost.
• Nothing here is a source you can show a lender or an investor. For that you need the marketplace's own published schedule.