APPLIED AI·08 March 2026·6 MIN READ
Applied AI: define graduation criteria before you build the pilot
Pilots fail to graduate because nobody defined what graduation looks like. Fix it upfront with explicit metrics and guardrails.
A pilot without graduation criteria is a science project.
Define the metric, the threshold and the operating model before you write a line of code.
Build for production from day one — monitoring, guardrails, human-in-the-loop. Then the graduation conversation is short.