The Pilot-to-Production Gap

A real AI project runs: pick a narrow, expensive problem → baseline the current process (what does it cost today, how often is it wrong?) → pilot on real data against a pre-set bar → harden (guardrails, fallbacks, monitoring, integration) → roll out in stages → own it forever (evals, re-tuning, model upgrades).

The step everyone skips is the baseline — and without it, you'll never prove the thing worked, because nobody wrote down what 'before' looked like.