Every technology arrives twice. First as a story, and much later as a thing that either works in your building or does not. Telling the two apart is a leadership skill, not a technical one. The question is never whether a technology is real. It is what the technology has been tested to do, who ran the test, and what they had at stake in the answer. The AI Alignment Filter™ runs that question in four steps: name the bottleneck, identify which kind of cognitive load the tool addresses, count the true cost of integration, and decide whether the tool replaces judgment or enhances it. Before any of that, establish one thing. Are you looking at a regulated technology that a disinterested third party has examined, or at software that someone is selling you? Both can be excellent. They demand entirely different questions.