Every agency I talk to has an AI pilot. Some have 4 or 5. They sit in a Notion page somewhere with a name like “Workflow Acceleration Phase 1”, a Slack channel with 12 members, and a demo that went well in March.
What almost none of them have is a job that used to take a person and now doesn’t.
That’s the tell. A pilot is supposed to be a test with a decision at the end of it. Keep or kill. But the pilots I see are designed so that neither answer is ever forced. The tool gets used by the 2 people who were already keen. Everyone else carries on as before, and the thing drifts into that permanent, half-alive state where it’s too useful to cancel and too small to matter.
Why it happens
It isn’t laziness and it isn’t fear of the robots. It’s that nobody wants to be the person who says the old process is finished. In an agency, the old process has names attached to it. Saying “we don’t need three rounds of manual QA on reporting any more” is really saying something about the people who do the three rounds, and most managers would rather keep the pilot ambiguous than have that conversation.
So the technology gets blamed for being “not quite there yet”, which is a phrase that can be true forever. Or finance arrives first and caps it, which is what happened at Accenture.
What landing looks like
The pilots that turn into something share one boring feature: somebody wrote down, before it started, what would stop being done if it worked. Not “we’ll save time”. Which meetings, which documents, which approvals. Then they put a date on it.
That’s uncomfortable, because it means the pilot can fail in public. But it also means it can succeed in public, and that’s the only version that changes how a business runs.
If your AI pilot has been running for more than a quarter and nobody’s job has changed, it isn’t a pilot. It’s a hobby with a budget line, and the people in it already know.