A successful pilot can be the worst thing that happens to a deal.

One of mine ran six months and found savings nobody disputed. It still went nowhere.

The two previous pieces were about who owns the budget and what your champion personally risks. Underneath both sits the money that paid for the pilot.

A proof of concept and a pilot are different animals, and I have run plenty of each. A PoC asks whether the technology can do the thing. It sits inside a buying process and it ends in a decision and a funded project. A pilot asks whether it works here, with your data and your people, and far too often it ends in a report.

Innovation budgets are a large part of why. They exist because the technology is unproven, so they are sized for finding out, never for a rollout, and they rarely sit with whoever would own the thing in production.

You take it anyway. The logo is worth something, the upside behind it looks enormous, and large enterprises are usually the only ones with that kind of money to play with. So the trap sits exactly where you most want to be, which is why it keeps catching people who know better.

So when the pilot works, your champion ends up worse off than before it started. They have spent exploration money, proved the case, and now have to find real money from budget holders who were never in the room. By then their name is on it too. Both problems arrive at once, and the success is what caused them. Which is how the smaller, cheaper exercise converts and the bigger one does not.

Back to one of my pilots. Six months at a large European enterprise, real savings, nobody arguing with the findings. And no route from the fund that paid for the pilot to the budget that would have paid for production.

So the question belongs up front. If this works, which budget pays for it, and does the person who owns that budget know we are doing this? Ask it before you start the pilot.