Your first AI pilot: choose a task you can evaluate
A useful starting point has available source material, a person responsible for the process and a clear way to tell whether the result helped.
Start with a step in the workflow
A brief such as 'we want AI in our business' is too broad to evaluate meaningfully. A more precise starting point is a support worker looking for an answer in manuals, a salesperson comparing a request with a catalogue, or a colleague entering data from a document. For each task, you can describe the input, the expected result and the decision that stays with a person.
Choose a process that a specific team understands and that happens often enough to provide representative examples. A pilot for an unusual task can look good in a demonstration while revealing little about daily work. It also helps to know what the team should do when the source material is insufficient.
Find out what takes time today
Map the current process before introducing AI. How long does searching take? Which steps repeat? Where do corrections occur? The evaluation must also account for reviewing the draft output. If a tool produces an answer quickly but a person spends a long time fixing it, generation time alone does not explain the benefit.
The measure need not be financial. For a knowledge assistant, the team can assess whether an answer contains the information it needs and whether a source supports it. For documents, the team can check the accuracy of individual fields. Agree on the rules before seeing the first results.
Source material and access are part of the brief
The success of a task also depends on what the solution can use. Documents may be outdated, exist in different versions or have different access permissions. Handing over a folder of files is therefore not enough for a pilot. You need to identify the source, the content owner and how it will be kept up to date.
A solution should not disclose information to someone simply because it can find that information somewhere. The design must account for who may see both the source and the output. Suitable sample material can be selected for initial tests; access to sensitive data should follow an agreement on the environment and responsibilities.
Example scope: help with choosing a product
Imagine a pilot in which an assistant suggests a suitable product category based on a customer's question. The team selects sample requests, prepares an acceptable answer for each and identifies the sources that explain it. A catalogue may contain similar names and different specifications. You therefore need to assess whether the recommendation is appropriate, rather than just whether it reads fluently.
When a question lacks necessary details, the assistant should ask for them. When information is unavailable, it should not invent a product feature. A task with these boundaries lets you test behaviour on both routine and difficult questions. This is an illustrative pilot scope; tests and results need to be prepared for the particular catalogue.
Test incomplete questions too
The test set should include routine tasks as well as cases in which a detail is missing, a document contradicts itself or the answer is absent from the sources. Define acceptable behaviour for each. Sometimes the correct result is a follow-up question or a handover to a person.
Keep the tests and repeat them when the source material, model or settings change. A new version can improve one task and make another worse. Using the same set helps distinguish the impression made by a good demonstration from a result you can compare.
Pilots and production need different agreements
A pilot can run with a limited number of users and manual review of every output. Before wider use, you need to address integrations, permissions, costs, error monitoring and responsibility for support. Assess the pilot's benefit alongside the cost of its ongoing operation.
The outcome should also be a decision: continue, change the task or stop the pilot. Finding that a clear rule or better search without generation is enough is useful. It can save the business from further investment in an unsuitable solution.
Put the topic into practice.
Related project: CBC Slovakia