From AI Pilot to Production: Five Questions to Answer
The demo worked. Now it has to become a service people can trust—even under load, with missing information, or when an exception occurs.
The gap between an impressive demo and a system that works every day is not measured only by model accuracy. It is measured by the organization’s ability to understand behavior, handle exceptions, and keep operating when a provider or model changes.
Five readiness questions
- What is the business outcome, and who owns it?
- What information enters the system, and who may access it?
- Which conditions stop the automation and hand work to a person?
- How do we measure quality, cost, and end-to-end time?
- Can we reconstruct what happened from the records, including the inputs, actions, and model version?
A trace should let you investigate a past action; it does not guarantee that rerunning a model will produce the same answer.
If one question has no clear answer, that does not mean the project must stop. It means you have found the right next experiment before scaling it.