What's haunting your data and AI?
A field guide to the monsters that haunt data teams, from numbers nobody can trace to data that isn't ready for AI.
How the field guide works
Build your rogue squad · two ways in
Confess, meet your monster
- Describe your data headache in two or three sentences.
- Get a % haunted match, or summon a brand-new monster.
- Share it on LinkedIn, or add it to your rogue squad.
The bestiary leaderboard · most sighted first
The bestiary
Ranked by how many data teams they haunt. Is yours near the top?
- Browse the monsters stalking data teams, from founding fiends to fresh sightings.
- Pick up to five for your rogue squad.
- Share your rogue squad on LinkedIn.
The Zombie Pilot
The proof of concept that never dies and never ships
Haunting 9 data teams
The 3 a.m. Banshee
Screams whenever the nightly pipeline fails
Haunting 6 data teams
The Hallucinating Oracle
Wrong, with total confidence
Haunting 5 data teams
The Headless KPI
Rides into the board meeting with no owner and no source
Haunting 4 data teams
The Metric Mimic
Seven definitions of "customer", all called "customer"
Haunting 3 data teams
The Legacy Mummy
Twenty years of patches; nobody dares unwrap it
Haunting 3 data teams
The Token Vampire
Drains your credits overnight
Haunting 2 data teams
The Excel Poltergeist
The spreadsheet that secretly runs finance
Haunting one data team
The Data Swamp Thing
The data lake nobody dares wade into
Haunting one data team
The Compliance Wraith
Appears at audit time asking where the personal data lives
Haunting one data team
The Silo Gargoyle
Guards your data, shares none of it
Haunting one data team
The Firefighting Hydra
Fix one fault, two more sprout
Haunting one data team
The Vanishing Shredder Jaws
Gone in one click, mourned for weeks
Haunting one data team
The Agenda Puppeteer
Pulls every string toward personal glory
Haunting one data team
The Scope Creep Leech
Small favours, endlessly, on a shoestring budget
Haunting one data team
The Borrowed Face Doppelganger
Wears your identity better than you do
Haunting one data team
The Dashboard Necromancer
Keeps refreshing reports nobody has opened since 2019
The Shadow Agent
Someone's personal agent, running with production credentials
The Copilot Changeling
Work that looks right until someone checks it
The Vanishing Wizard
The only person who understands the pipeline just resigned
The ROI Phantom
Everyone has seen the AI value; nobody can prove it