AI & Automation · · 7 min read
How to Launch Your First AI Agent Pilot in Six Weeks
A week-by-week plan for launching a first AI agent pilot — choosing the use case, setting a baseline, building safely and measuring results.
Most AI initiatives stall not because the technology fails, but because the first project is too broad, has no baseline, or never reaches real users. A focused six-week pilot avoids all three.
01 · Stage
Weeks 1–2
- Pick use case
- Measure baseline
02 · Stage
Weeks 3–4
- Guardrails
- Build & integrate
03 · Stage
Week 5
- Shadow testing
- Refine
04 · Stage
Week 6
- Go live
- Compare to baseline
- Scale decision
The six-week plan
Week 1 — Choose the use case
Look for work that is frequent, repetitive and rules-based, such as ticket triage, lead qualification or invoice entry. Agree a single business owner.
Week 2 — Measure the baseline
Record today's volume, handling time, error rate and cost per task. Without a baseline, results are just opinions.
Week 3 — Design guardrails
Define what the agent may and may not do, which systems it can access, when it must ask a person and how actions are logged.
Week 4 — Build and integrate
Connect the agent to the necessary systems with scoped credentials and build an evaluation set of real examples.
Week 5 — Test with real cases
Run the agent in shadow mode or with approval required. Review every output and refine instructions and tools.
Week 6 — Go live and measure
Release to a small group, compare against the baseline and decide whether to scale, adjust or stop.
Success criteria to agree up front
Time saved per task and in total each week.
Accuracy compared with human handling on the same cases.
Percentage of cases handled without escalation.
User and customer satisfaction.
