The pilot worked. Everyone saw the demo. Eighteen months later it is still a demo. The reasons are consistent, unglamorous, and almost never about the model.
All AI for Enterprise →
A pilot is built to prove that a thing is possible. Production requires proving that it is reliable, supportable, permissioned, monitored, affordable and better than what it replaces. Those are different projects, and the second is larger than the first — which is the opposite of how the budget is usually split.
The failure is structural rather than technical. A pilot is optimised for speed of demonstration: hardcode the credentials, use the export rather than the API, skip the edge cases, run it on the ten documents that work. Every one of those shortcuts is correct for a pilot and fatal as a foundation. When the pilot succeeds, the organisation naturally asks to "just productionise it" — and the honest answer is that most of the work has not started.
Below are the five gaps we see most often, in roughly the order they kill projects — and a sixth that is worth naming.
| Criterion | Typical pilot | Pilot designed to ship |
|---|---|---|
| Data access | Export or sample file | Authenticated API against real systems |
| Quality bar | Decided in review meetings | Labelled eval set agreed up front |
| Security review | After the build | Constraint on the initial design |
| Failure handling | Happy path only | Typed exception routes with owners |
| Cost model | Not calculated | Modelled at production volume |
| Ownership | Unassigned | Named, with a runbook |
| Typical outcome | Stalls after the demo | Reaches production |
Yes, but scope it to answer a specific question rather than to impress. A good pilot has a written hypothesis (“an agent can resolve at least 30% of tier-1 tickets at human-level accuracy”), a labelled evaluation set, and a pre-agreed decision on what happens at each possible outcome — including stopping. A pilot with no defined failure condition cannot fail, which means it also cannot succeed.
As a rule of thumb, roughly a quarter. If a pilot takes six weeks, budget the production path at eighteen to twenty-four more — integration, evaluation infrastructure, monitoring, exception handling, security sign-off and the process change. Organisations that budget production as a small increment on the pilot are the ones that stall.
Often, and it is a common starting point. The first step is an honest architectural review: some pilots are a solid foundation with gaps, and some are a prototype whose shortcuts are load-bearing. We will tell you which, including when the answer is that rebuilding is cheaper than remediating — that answer costs us revenue in the short term and saves it for you.
Build the evaluation set. Before the architecture, before the model choice. A hundred labelled examples of what a correct output looks like, produced by the people who will judge the system, converts every downstream argument from opinion into measurement — and it frequently reveals that different stakeholders wanted different things, which is much cheaper to discover on day three than in month six.
Bring us what you have. We will give you an honest read on whether it is a foundation or a prototype.
30-minute technical call · no deck
What we built, what stage it is at, and a link to the live thing wherever there is one.
yourOS is an operating system with an AI at its heart. You talk to it like a person, out loud or typed. It makes your calls, plans your days and works on your projects with a crew of agents, on your own private server. Our own product, built from the first commit; the waitlist is open.
Website, backend and app assets for Sonora, a free AI sound-therapy app on iOS and Android published by Cognitive AI.
Brand, website, prototype, apps on five platforms, the AI backend and the algorithm-intelligence pipeline for Podswap, a social growth engine that runs without a human in the loop.
In closed beta: Roxy, a private AI assistant with permanent memory running on infrastructure the user owns. Brand, site, product, backend and conversational design.
Live at coherence.com: brand identity generated with AI agents we directed, the motion system and website for the group behind Sonora, AboutAI, WakeUp and MudShadows. Agent work remains in build.
Live at domainbooth.com for DomainBooth, a premium domain brokerage: a new animated mark, every page redesigned and rebuilt with designed mobile layouts, and a custom CMS for its sales record, featured names, press and enquiries.
Apps, platforms and campaigns for these teams, long before the AI work. Every one is written up on the work page — what we did, and where our part ended.
