Stop Calling It a Pilot

The most expensive word in AI adoption right now.

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Happy Wednesday,

Two weeks ago I wrote The Bottleneck Was Never the Technology. The argument was simple. The models are already more capable than what your organization is extracting from them. The constraint isn’t GPT or Claude or Copilot. It’s whether your CEO is willing to make real decisions and follow through.

I expected the article to land hard with some people. It did. What I didn’t expect was how many leaders messaged me afterwards saying some version of the same thing.

“Okay. I get it. I’m the bottleneck. Now what?”

Fair question. So this week I want to answer it.

And my answers and patterns come from mainly workshops, keynotes, leadership sessions across the UK, Sweden, Norway, US, with industrial companies, public sector, media houses, financial services, and retail. It’s hundreds of conversations, and the same pattern keeps showing up.

The organizations that move and the ones that don’t aren’t separated by budget, headcount, or even AI literacy. They’re separated by three things their leaders do.

1. They make a real call instead of “piloting” forever

The most expensive word in AI adoption right now is “pilot.”

A pilot used to mean something. You ran a small experiment, learned, decided.

Today “pilot” mostly means “I don’t want to commit, but I want to look like I’m doing something.” Twelve months later you have a working prototype, a tired team, and zero scaled outcomes. Then someone new joins the leadership team, and you start over.

The leaders who move skip that game. They commit to a direction. They tell the organization the direction is real. They put budget behind it. They make it clear that opting out isn’t an option for the function they’re responsible for. That doesn’t mean they have all the answers. It means they’ve decided that finding the answers is part of the job now, not a side project.

If you can’t make that call as a CEO or CHRO, ask yourself why. The honest answer is usually that you’re not sure enough yet. Which means the work is to get sure, not to keep piloting.

2. They build instead of buy

This has been the most striking pattern across the last three months.

People walk into workshops with problems they have been waiting on IT to solve for eighteen months. Eighteen months. By the end of a session some of them have a working tool that solves the problem. Not a perfect tool, but a working one. Enough to use Monday morning.

The leaders who move have figured out something specific. The shape of work has changed. You don’t need a vendor for everything anymore. A lot of what HR has been waiting in line for, you can now build yourself in an afternoon. Not all of it, but more than you think.

The leaders who don’t move are still routing every idea through a procurement process designed for buying ERP systems. By the time the RFP closes, the technology has moved twice. The capability they wanted has shipped natively in a tool they already pay for. And the team that needed it has given up.

If your organization can’t tell the difference between “we should buy something” and “we should build something this week,” that’s a leadership problem, not an IT problem.

3. They treat advisor selection as a real decision

I said this briefly in the last article. I want to say it louder now.

The amount of bad advice flowing through boardrooms and leadership teams right now is staggering. Some of it comes from internal people who are protecting their relevance. Some comes from external consultants who read three Substacks and call themselves AI strategists. Some comes from vendors with a clear interest in selling you the wrong thing.

The leaders who move have figured out who uses this stuff every day, who has built things that worked and things that didn’t, and who can tell them the truth. They don’t outsource the thinking. They use advisors to sharpen their own thinking.

The leaders who don’t move accept the first plausible-sounding plan that crosses their desk. Then they’re surprised when it produces nothing.

This isn’t about hiring me or anyone else. It’s about being deliberate. The wrong advisor in 2026 will cost you a year. The right one will compress two years into six months. That decision is worth your attention.

So what to do?

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in the “haven’t moved” group, here’s what I’d do.

Spend twenty bucks on Claude or ChatGPT for a month. Spend ten hours with it. Not delegating. Not asking your assistant to try it. You. Build something small that solves a real problem you have. Form your own opinion based on experience.

Then look at your leadership team and ask which of the three things above you’re doing. Not what you’ve said in town halls. What’s happening?

If the answer is none of them, you don’t have an AI strategy problem. You have a leadership problem. And the good news about leadership problems is that you can fix them, today. (Without anyone’s permission! This is the HR domain.)

The window for “we’ll figure it out later” closed sometime last quarter. Acting like it’s still open is the most expensive decision most leaders are making right now.

I’d rather you act and get it wrong than wait and get it right too late.
We can fix wrong. We can’t fix late.