Interested in hearing from those who pay for tech (particularly GenAI) pilots and under what circumstances?
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As someone deeply involved in driving enterprise-scale transformation through Data & AI initiatives, I believe paying for GenAI pilots is justified when these three conditions align:
Strategic Alignment: The pilot must directly support a business-critical objective—whether it's modernizing legacy content or optimizing supply chain operations through intelligent data modeling.
Scalable Proof of Value: We invest when the pilot is designed not just to showcase technical feasibility but to validate measurable impact—speed, accuracy, cost-efficiency—that can be scaled across functions.
Enterprise Readiness: We pay when the pilot includes governance, security, and integration considerations from day one. GenAI is powerful, but without enterprise-grade guardrails, it’s just a demo.
Ultimately, I see GenAI pilots not as experiments, but as "strategic accelerators"—when they’re framed with the right business lens.
Early adoptors are the innovators, and I believe they understand pilots are just that, a mechanism for showing and proving value. A discounted pilot in exchange for proof points, PR, whatever you find value in, is the approach I typically take. A "no cost" pilot has been tempting many times to get traffic. The few times I've agreed to that, the other partner has nothing to lose, so they haven't always committed on their side.