You know AI has escaped the demo when the network team starts complaining. That is usually when the technology becomes real.
A technology stops being a feature story and becomes an operating reality when it changes traffic shape, permissions, and observability before it changes the org chart.
I trust infrastructure symptoms more than launch narratives. Product teams talk about new capabilities. The network sees longer-lived flows, stranger asymmetries, new latency pressure, and workloads that no longer behave like the old ones. Security sees the same thing from the other side: least privilege gets harder, runtime visibility matters more, and assumptions that held for deterministic software stop holding for agents.
That is the moment I pay attention. Not when the feature ships, but when the surrounding system has to reconfigure itself to tolerate the feature. A lot of strategy conversations arrive after the infrastructure already knows the answer.
If your AI plan has not reached the network and auth layers, it is still marketing.