Where pilots actually die
Four things, over and over. Nobody’s name is on the outcome. Ten use cases run at once, so none of them finish. The team builds a demo that wins the room and folds under real traffic. And there’s no evaluation suite, no monitoring, no cost ceiling, so security, risk and legal have no reason to sign off. They don’t.
Notice what’s missing from that list: the model. These are ownership and engineering problems, and they cost far less to fix than the next round of vendor demos.
How to get one workflow into production
Pick one workflow with real money attached and put one person’s name on it. Then harden it the way you’d harden anything touching customers or regulated data: evals that run on every change, monitoring someone would trust at 3 a.m., a cost ceiling, a security review with an actual sign-off. Ship it inside the process people already use, not alongside it. And set the go/no-go date before you start, so leadership scales it, extends it, or kills it on evidence rather than mood.
What another quarter of pilots costs
Budget gone, nothing in production, and a board that trusts the next AI request a little less than the last one. Meanwhile the competitor who got one workflow live is compounding — their engineers are learning things yours aren’t. Getting out of this rarely takes a better model. It takes one accountable operator who ships a single thing and can point to the line it moved.
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