your ai pilot is not a small version of the project. it is a way to spend money without deciding anything.

mit's finding, that 95 percent of enterprise ai pilots produce zero measurable p&l impact, gets read as a verdict on the technology. it is a verdict on the setup: a pilot with no owner, no number, and no end date cannot fail, which is exactly why it clears approval so easily. the cost is not the license fee, it is two quarters of your best operator's attention and the credibility you burn internally when it quietly stops being mentioned. s&p global found 42 percent of companies abandoned most of their ai projects in 2025, and the survivors were not the fanciest tools, they were the ones wired into a real workflow with a name attached. the advice going around is to start small and learn, which sounds like prudence and functions as permission to not commit.

do the version that holds: pick one workflow, name the number it should move and by how much, name the person who owns that number, and set the date you either kill it or scale it. if you cannot fill in all four, you do not have a pilot, you have a subscription.