Pricing AI Proofs-of-Concept: free pilots will kill you

You know that sinking feeling when a “promising” proof of concept drags on for months, burns through your engineering resources, and ends with “we need more time to evaluate”?

Yes, that means most AI agent companies are doing pilots completely wrong. They’re treating them like tech demos when they should be treating them like business case laboratories.

Every company has an AI mandate now – and they come down from the board. Some VP gets told “go figure out this AI thing” and suddenly you’re their science experiment.

They’ll say yes to your pilot (you should read about The Mom Test if you got a yes). You’ll get some junior engineer to “monitor progress”.

They’ll sit through your weekly check-ins. And after 90 days of burning your best engineers, they’ll tell you they need to “evaluate a few more options”.

These people aren’t buying anything. They’re just satisfying their curiosity (or their board’s) about whether AI “actually works”.

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