Most AI pilots die the same way: they get built by someone who understands the model but not the workflow, handed to someone who understands the workflow but not the model, and nobody owns getting it from "works in a demo" to "runs on live data every day."
The pilots that ship are the ones built next to the person who will actually use them — the acquisitions lead, the analyst, the ops manager — not built in isolation and thrown over the wall. That's slower on day one and much faster by week six, because there's no re-education phase where the tool has to be explained to the person who was supposed to want it.
If a pilot has been "almost done" for more than a month, the problem usually isn't the model. It's that nobody who understands the day-to-day workflow has been in the room since kickoff.
