Five questions to answer before your first AI pilot
Most pilots fail before they start, in the scoping. Here is the checklist we run with every client before a line of code is written.
2 Sept 2026 · 2 min read
The organisations that get value from AI quickly are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that chose a small, sharp first problem and answered a handful of questions honestly before anyone opened a laptop. These are the five we ask.
1. What does this problem cost every week?
Not in the abstract. Count the hours, the delayed invoices, the tickets that sit for days, the audit findings. If you cannot put a rough weekly number on it, it is not yet a pilot candidate. A pilot needs a baseline so that in six weeks you can say, plainly, whether it worked.
2. Who owns the outcome?
One named person on your side, with the authority to give access, make decisions, and accept the deliverable. Pilots with a committee as the owner drift. Pilots with a busy but committed owner ship.
3. Where does the data live today?
Spreadsheets, a legacy portal, WhatsApp groups, paper registers. All of these are workable starting points. What matters is knowing which of them is the current source of truth, because the first job of any system we build is to become that source without breaking the habits around it.
4. What must not change?
Every organisation has a process that is inefficient but load-bearing: a sign-off step required by a regulator, a report the board expects in a specific format, a supplier who will only take orders by email. Naming these early keeps the pilot from solving a problem you were not allowed to solve.
5. What does done look like?
Write the acceptance criteria before the work starts. Three to five sentences: what the system does, for whom, measured how. We put these in every Statement of Work, and they are the difference between a pilot that ends with a decision and one that ends with a meeting.
A good pilot is small enough to ship in weeks and big enough that someone would notice if it disappeared.
If you can answer all five, you are ready. If you can answer three, that is a good first conversation. Either way, the intake form on our contact page walks through exactly these questions.
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