Your AI pilot has been 'almost ready' for 18 months. The demo was impressive. Leadership bought in. Then... nothing. You're stuck in what McKinsey calls 'pilot purgatory'—and 2026 is the year your board stops accepting 'we're still experimenting.'
The POC worked brilliantly. Production deployment keeps getting pushed 'one more sprint.'
Nobody can explain what 'done' actually looks like for this AI project.
Technical team says 'almost ready.' Business team says 'still waiting.' Nobody owns the gap.
The project has no clear owner with authority to make ship-or-kill decisions.
I come in as embedded AI leadership with one mandate: ship. Not advice from the sidelines—hands-on leadership with decision authority.
Identify the real blockers in week one. Technical debt? Scope creep? Missing alignment? Unrealistic expectations?
Establish clear, measurable graduation criteria. What does 'production' actually mean for this project?
30-60-90 day plan with weekly checkpoints. Embedded leadership, not external advice.
At 90 days: production deployment, documented pivot, or kill decision. No more 'permanent pilot.'
A battle-tested approach to rescuing stuck AI initiatives, developed from 50+ successful production deployments. While 70% of AI pilots never reach production, this methodology delivers ship-or-pivot decisions in 90 days.
You have an AI pilot that's been 'almost ready' for too long. Your board is losing patience. You need embedded leadership with authority to unblock the team and force decisions.
Most stuck pilots are organizational, not technical. Common blockers include unclear ownership, misaligned incentives, and scope creep. I address both technical and organizational blockers—that's why the engagement includes embedded leadership with decision authority.
I work alongside your team 2-3 days per week as de facto project lead. I attend standups, make technical decisions, unblock teams, and report to stakeholders. I'm not advising from the sidelines—I'm accountable for shipping.
That's a valid outcome. Sometimes the right decision is to pivot or kill a project that can't achieve business value. At 90 days, you'll have either a production deployment or a documented decision with clear reasoning. Both are progress—permanent pilot purgatory is the only unacceptable outcome.
I've led transformation in complex organizations—Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, Cisco. I focus on alignment around outcomes, not blame for past delays. Teams usually welcome clear direction and decision authority that unblocks their work.
Our goal is a clear outcome within 90 days: ship, pivot, or kill. Most pilots we engage with reach production; the rest result in documented pivot or kill decisions—which is still a valuable outcome. The worst case is perpetual pilot purgatory, where organizations spend €500K+ on a project that never ships and never dies. Every engagement ends with a decisive outcome.
The DEPLOY Method™ is complementary to Agile, not a replacement. Agile handles sprint-level execution; DEPLOY handles the strategic gaps that keep AI pilots stuck: Diagnose the real blockers, Engineer for production (not demos), Pilot with clear graduation criteria, Launch to real users, Optimize continuously, Yield measurable business impact. Most stuck pilots aren't failing at sprint execution—they're failing at the strategic layer above it.
Embedded leadership means 2-3 days per week working alongside your team—either on-site or via remote collaboration depending on location and preference. For European clients within travel distance, I typically do a mix of on-site and remote. For broader European clients, remote-first with periodic on-site visits for key milestones and stakeholder sessions.
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