1. Have You Defined the Business Problem You're Trying to Solve?
You don’t want to find out what ChatGPT can do. You want to know whether AI brings value in solving a known real problem — some cost or risk to be reduced, some workflow or bottleneck to be optimized, some service to be improved. The problem you want to solve is the starting point for everything. The pilot must address something very specific, or it’s just a technology demo.
2. How Will You Know If the AI Pilot Is a Success?
Showing that AI works is fun and easy. But you must prove that it helps the organization in a measurable way, such as lower costs, faster transactions, happier customers, higher productivity or improved accuracy. Experimenting with AI may be exciting, but without some metrics attached to the pilot before you start, you can’t argue that you're moving the organization forward.
DIVE DEEPER: Learn how to escape AI pilot purgatory.
3. Is Your Existing Data Going to Work for AI?
Any AI system requires either training or access to existing databases, or both. Whether training in advance or querying as you go, AI needs real data to build expertise and intelligence. This could be drawn from customer order history, past chats, inventory and manufacturing data or something else. Your existing data needs to be in such condition that AI can use it to get smarter and gain domain-specific knowledge. If you don’t have that, you’ll need to clean your data first.
4. Are You Looking at a Realistic Business Workflow?
ChatGPT might stun the CEO with brilliant insights, but that’s no pilot. The pilot must include a full workflow: training on existing knowledge; integrating with identity and access management tools; meeting performance goals; supporting privacy, security and logging requirements; fitting into existing user interface/user experience frameworks and dealing with inevitable errors. The AI part is the easiest part to demo. The pilot is what makes it useful to the business.
5. What Happens If the AI Pilot Succeeds?
If the pilot succeeds, then what? Do you have the budget to run the model? Is your governance structure ready? Are staff members able to support this new product? You don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself when running a pilot, but before you dive in, you should have a credible plan to get it into production if it works.
