Why most AI pilots never ship
· 5 min · six12labs
The graveyard is full of impressive pilots. The usual cause is not the model. It is that nobody owned runtime, nobody owned evals, and nobody wanted the pager.
Three missing owners
- A product owner for the workflow, not “AI” as a theme
- An operator for health, cost, and rollback
- A knowledge owner for sources and freshness
Make production the default environment
Shadow traffic, a health page, and a twelve-week timebox beat another sandbox. six12labs exists to put those rails under the team that will still be there after the kickoff slides fade.