Why 80% of AI pilots never reach production

Most organisations do not have a technology problem; they have an ownership problem. AI pilots start inside a technical team, get demoed in a meeting, and die the moment someone asks who takes on the risk, the recurring cost and the compliance burden of moving to production.

The three leak points

• No executive owner: nobody with budget and authority is accountable for the outcome.
• No success criteria: the metric to move, and the timeframe, were never agreed upfront.
• No governance path: the pilot works but cannot pass legal, security or data review.

Define these three elements before you start and the conversation changes: the pilot stops being an experiment and becomes phase one of an implementation with an owner, a budget and a decision date.

A pilot without prior decision criteria is not an experiment: it is an expensive demo.

What to do differently next cycle

Before approving any initiative, require a one-page brief: business problem, target metric, executive owner, identified regulatory risks and the date the scale-or-stop decision will be made. If that page cannot be written, the initiative is not ready to consume capital.