AI Strategy & Leadership Practical insights
Give your 90-day AI pilot a real decision point
Plan a 90-day AI marketing pilot with a baseline, observable outcome and named decision owner, so the final review can scale, change or stop the work.
A 90-day pilot is useful when its final decision is clear before it begins. Define what the organization needs to learn, what evidence would change its mind and who can act on the result. Ninety days is a planning window, not proof that every marketing outcome can be measured within it.
Choose one observable outcome
A hypothetical pilot could test whether AI-assisted campaign briefs reach accepted quality with less total preparation effort. Define accepted quality before collecting results and include reviewer time. Anthropic’s evaluation guidance supports specifying tasks and success criteria. [1] Apply that discipline to the business question rather than treating enthusiastic user feedback as the whole result.
Use the first month to establish comparison
Document the current process, baseline variation and relevant constraints. Prepare representative tasks and a limited operating scope. Check access, source quality and ownership before the pilot handles real work. If a valid baseline cannot be established, make resolving that uncertainty the first decision rather than claiming a future improvement against an unknown starting point.
Use the middle month to learn
Run the approved workflow on comparable tasks and record failures as well as successes. Note interventions and changes to the setup. A pilot that quietly receives expert help on every difficult case may demonstrate an assisted service, not a scalable automated process. Keep the team’s observations specific enough to explain why outcomes changed.
Reserve the final month for a decision
Compare results with the agreed thresholds and total cost. Choose scale when the evidence and operating capacity support it, change when the hypothesis remains plausible but a known issue blocks it, or stop when value is insufficient. Record unresolved questions and a responsible owner. Avoid extending the pilot indefinitely simply because people have already invested time in it.
Sources and evidence
Sources checked on 4 October 2026. Proposed workflows and hypothetical examples are editorial analysis.
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