The Production Gap: Why Enterprise AI Pilots Stall Before They Ship
Most enterprise AI pilots do not fail on the model; they fail in the production gap, the delivery and operating work between a working demo and a system that survives reality. Here is the last-mile discipline that moves an AI pilot into production, and why roughly 95% never make it.
The reason your AI pilot is not in production has almost nothing to do with the model.
We keep debating benchmarks, context windows, and which foundation model wins this quarter. Meanwhile the pilot that dazzled everyone in the demo sits in a branch nobody has merged, waiting on the unglamorous work that no one scoped. That work has a name. I call it the production gap, and it is where most enterprise AI goes to die.
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