FIELD NOTES

How To Pilot AI Without Getting Burned

The 6-week pilot framework that avoids the most common ways AI projects die: scope creep, vendor lock, no champion, fuzzy success criteria.

How the post opens

AI pilots fail in the same three ways. The scope creeps from one workflow to four. The success criteria are vague. The pilot has no internal champion. Below: the six-week framework that avoids all three.

What it argues

The tradeoffs we made and why Every architecture choice in this category is a tradeoff. Here are the ones we have made consciously, and the alternative we did not pick. We use Pipecat instead of building our own orchestration. The win is months of saved engineering. The cost is being a release behind on a few model integrations.

Filed under

Why this one exists

The 6-week pilot framework that avoids the most common ways AI projects die: scope creep, vendor lock, no champion, fuzzy success criteria. It is filed under AI Strategy because that is where operators looking for this problem actually start, and it is written from production work rather than from a content calendar.