Usage Theatre is what organisations perform when they cannot measure the value of AI and measure its use instead. Adoption dashboards go up, licence counts become KPIs, and employees learn to perform the metric rather than improve the work. Much of the adoption is real; what is being performed is the usage. The measure of an AI programme is whether decisions got better, and that is harder to count, which is exactly why so few organisations count it. The term was introduced by Rahim Hirji in 2026.