The industry's dirty secret is the pilot graveyard: impressive demos that never touched a real workflow. The pattern of failure is consistent enough to name.
Pilots fail because they're scoped as experiments
A pilot scoped as "let's see if the AI works" has no owner, no integration, and no number attached. It succeeds in the demo room and dies in procurement, because nobody defined what production would even mean.
The accuracy question is real but answerable: evals answer it in week one. The unanswered questions are operational: who reviews the edge cases, what system does the output land in, what number moves if it works.
The production-slice alternative
Scope a production slice instead of a science project: one workflow, wired into the real stack, with a human-in-the-loop step and a before/after measurement. A tight, scoped slice is enough to ship that (we've done it across 50+ projects), and at the end you have either a working system or a cheap, honest "no" backed by data.
Either outcome beats a beautiful demo and a nine-month committee.
