Video · 9 min · Lesson 6 of 7
From pilot to production
Why pilots stall, and how a six-week time box keeps momentum.
Transcript
Many agent pilots never ship. The reasons repeat: scope grows with every demo, nobody defined what good enough means, the pilot runs on a laptop without authentication, logging or monitoring, and no one with authority owns the rollout.
A time-boxed approach helps. Spend the first week on discovery: architecture on one page, a risk register, a cost estimate and success metrics. Build on production infrastructure from the first day, behind a feature flag, so nothing needs rewriting at the end.
Roll out gradually, for example to five, then twenty-five, then one hundred percent of cases, while watching the logs and the approval rate at each checkpoint. Hand over with documentation and a monitoring runbook, so the team can run the agent without its builders in the room.
Key takeaways
- Pilots stall on scope creep, unclear success criteria and missing production basics.
- Build on production infrastructure from day one.
- Roll out gradually and hand over with documentation and monitoring.