Structural Drag is the financial bleed hidden in the dead space between when a project is marked complete by IT and when the business confirms the promised value has arrived. It is invisible to standard enterprise tools because those tools stop tracking at deployment, while value realization typically takes 12-24 months post-deployment. As AI portfolios scale, undetected Structural Drag compounds across every initiative simultaneously – a portfolio carrying significant Structural Drag isn’t experiencing a technology failure, it’s experiencing a governance failure.