briefings

The Production Gap

AI pilots rarely fail on technical merit. They stall at the boundary between experiment and operation, where governance built for stable, predictable systems meets one that is probabilistic and always changing.

Proof of concept, pilot, and production are not three sizes of the same thing. They are different regimes with different governance. Most programmes are designed as pilots and then asked to behave as production, without anyone redesigning the operating model that governs production.

Upfront approval does not remove risk. It freezes the system at an earlier, less accurate state and defers the risk to a moment when no one is looking. The return problem lives here: a capable system held behind approval cycles runs on stale assumptions at scale.

The fix is structural, not more governance: assurance that runs at the system’s tempo, and decision rights placed where the information already sits.

Read the full argument in The Production Gap.