CM-201b · Module 1

Pilot Selection Criteria

4 min read

The right pilot team is not the team that is most enthusiastic. The enthusiastic team will show good numbers regardless — they were going to adopt anyway. The right pilot team is the team whose results, if positive, will be credible to the skeptical majority.

Four criteria define the right pilot. High visibility: the rest of the organization knows the pilot is happening and will notice the results. Low risk: if the pilot fails, the business continues without catastrophic consequence. High value: when the pilot succeeds, the value is obvious — not in a dashboard, but in actual work quality and speed that people can see. And managed by champions, not skeptics: skeptic-managed pilots find problems to validate the skepticism.

Do This

Select a team that skeptics recognize as doing real, representative work — not an outlier team
Choose a workflow where AI value is obvious: meaningful time savings, quality improvement, or capability expansion
Select a team with a credible champion who has informal influence beyond their immediate team
Pick a context where failure, if it happens, is recoverable and does not threaten the broader initiative
Ensure the pilot is visible enough that the organization knows it happened and what the results were

Avoid This

Pick the most enthusiastic team — their success will be dismissed as "they would have adopted anything"
Select a workflow so niche that skeptics can say "that would not work for us"
Choose a high-stakes workflow where any failure will be used to block the rollout
Run a pilot so quietly that most of the organization does not know it happened
Let a skeptic manage the pilot — they will find the edge cases and declare the technology unready