The Pilot's Job

Let me be clear about what a pilot is not: a pilot is not a test of whether the AI works. The AI works. You have the vendor case studies, the demo environment, the benchmark scores. The technology question is answered before you start.

A pilot is a test of whether AI works for this organization, in this context, for these people. That is a completely different question requiring a completely different design. Most pilots are designed to answer the technology question and then puzzled when the organizational question goes unanswered.

The pilot's actual job is to produce organizational conviction — the shared belief that the AI is valuable, usable, and safe enough to deploy broadly. Conviction is not produced by accurate benchmark scores. It is produced by trusted colleagues demonstrating real results in real workflows that skeptics recognize as genuinely similar to their own.

This means pilot design is fundamentally a stakeholder exercise. Who needs to be convinced? What would convince them? Who has the credibility to do the convincing? The answers to those questions determine the pilot design: which team, which workflow, which champion, which results to measure and publicize.