Seven questions teams should answer before greenlighting an AI agent pilot
kashifmanzoor · x · 2026-07-23
Before approving a first AI agent pilot, the author says teams should answer seven questions first—otherwise they are not ready, and it is cheaper to pause now than to learn the hard way later.
The checklist covers:
- Which workflow the agent lives inside, and who owns it today.
- The baseline metric to improve, such as cycle time, cost per case, or error rate.
- What happens when the agent is wrong, who catches it, and how quickly.
- Whether the required data is accessible, clean, and allowed to be used.
- The human escalation path and whether that person has capacity.
- How the system will be evaluated: golden set, spot checks, or vibes.
- What “kill it” means before deployment starts.
The author says most pilots that fail in production never answered questions 3, 6, and 7; they had enthusiasm where they needed architecture.
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