AI pilot rescue
The pilot worked. Production never happened.
A Copilot rollout, an Agentforce build, a Bedrock agent, a RAG prototype that impressed everyone in the demo. Then it met real data, real permissions, and someone asking who signs off on it.
42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17% the year before. The average organisation scrapped 46% of its proofs-of-concept before they reached production. S&P Global Market Intelligence, Voice of the Enterprise: AI & ML, 2025 — survey of 1,000+ enterprises in North America and Europe
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Demo
impressed everyone
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Pilot
curated data, one team
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Integration
stalls heresystems of record have owners
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Data readiness
stalls herethe real corpus is messy
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Governance
stalls herewho signs off when it is wrong
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Production
None of the three is a model problem. All of them are delivery problems.
Why they stall
Three causes, none of them the model
Integration
The demo ran on a copy. Production needs the systems of record — and those have owners, rate limits and an auth model.
Data readiness
It answered well on curated documents. The real corpus is duplicated, stale in places, and permissioned per user.
Governance
Nobody could say what "working" meant, who is accountable when it is wrong, or what gets logged.
What you get first
A gap list, before anyone quotes a build
The specification comes with the list of what is actually in the way.
gap list
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Data readiness
Two sources disagree on customer status. No owner for the conflict.
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Integration points
Read path exists; the write path needs an approval step that does not.
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Human in the loop
No review step above a confidence threshold. Nothing to review with.
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Success metrics
None defined. Proposed: deflection rate, escalation accuracy, time to resolution.
Most stalled pilots never had success metrics. That line is usually the one that matters.
The sprint
Four to six weeks. One workflow.
One workflow taken from stalled to running, at a fixed price. Not a platform migration, not a strategy deck — the one thing that was supposed to work.
Every sprint ends with a quote to run it afterwards — evaluation against a fixed test set, permission hygiene, an incident log and a named accountable engineer. Priced as an outcome, never as a markup on your licences.
Who signs off
We do not certify our own work
Independent go-live certification exists and is run separately. If you need it, we will point you at it and stay out of the room. A vendor that builds the agent and also certifies it has not given you an assurance — it has given you an opinion about itself.
Defined by both lists
Tell us what stalled.
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