Most companies have run an AI pilot. Very few have shipped one to production.
The gap is not technical
It is operational. The skills that make a proof-of-concept impressive are not the skills that make a production system reliable.
The bottleneck is almost never the model. It is the pipeline around the model.
What actually ships
- Clear ownership of the pipeline end to end
- Monitoring that catches drift before users do
- A rollback plan that does not require an engineer
If your team cannot answer those three questions, the pilot is not ready.