Why AI pilots stall before production
Five conditions separate an impressive demo from an agent doing real work every day.
· 8 min read
Most enterprises have run AI pilots. Far fewer have agents completing work in production. The gap is rarely the model; it is everything around it.
Production needs five things: a clearly scoped workflow with a baseline, integration into the real systems of record, explicit controls and approval points, continuous evaluation of accuracy, and an owner accountable for outcomes after go-live.
Pilots tend to skip all five because they are built to prove possibility. Treat the first workflow as a production deployment from day one and the pilot problem largely disappears.