Accelerated Innovation

Supporting Internal Pilots to Sustain GenAI Adoption

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Supporting Internal Pilots to Sustain GenAI Adoption

Description

This capability focuses on designing, enabling, and supporting internal GenAI pilot programs that drive learning, build confidence, and uncover scalable use cases. Pilots serve as a structured proving ground for evaluating GenAI’s value within real workflows before broader rollout.

Why it's Important

Pilots are essential for moving beyond hype to real impact. They help teams experiment safely, measure outcomes, and refine GenAI solutions in context. Without proper support, pilots can stall, lose credibility, or fail to generate insights needed for scale. Structured pilot support builds trust, accelerates capability development, and ensures that GenAI adoption is grounded in real-world success.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • Lack of structured pilot design: Without clear goals, metrics, or timelines, pilots often drift or under-deliver.
  • Insufficient hands-on support: Teams may need guidance on prompt design, workflow integration, or safe experimentation.
  • Unclear criteria for success: Without shared standards, it’s hard to assess whether a pilot is ready to scale.
  • Pilot fatigue or overload: Too many disconnected pilots can overwhelm support resources and confuse stakeholders.
  • No mechanism to capture and apply learnings: Valuable insights from pilots are often lost or underleveraged across teams.

Complexity

High: Maturing this capability requires clear pilot frameworks, access to enablement resources, cross-functional coordination, and structured feedback loops. Success depends on balancing agility with discipline-and turning learnings into action at scale.

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Taking Action

Though most organizations begin their GenAI journey with significant knowledge gaps, there are targeted actions that can be taken to accelerate the process. Select your group’s current maturity, based on your assessment results, and act today.

The most important part of any journey is starting… To move from “Exploring” to “Experimenting”, focus on the following key actions:
  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the Accelerating Adoption of Your GenAI Solutions workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices.
  • Understanding Barriers to GenAI Adoption.
  • Positioning Adoption as a Growth Driver.
  • Defining Key Stakeholder Roles.
  • Creating an Adoption Success Framework.
  • Aligning Adoption Strategy to Business Value.
  • Define Your Action Plan: Outline concrete, prioritized steps your organization will take to implement GenAI Strategy.
  • Align on your Current State and define your Target State.
  • Create an actionable enablement plan.
  • Define target timeline and measures of success.
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.
  • Select 1-2 Pilot Teams to Support: Choose departments open to experimentation and provide dedicated guidance.
  • Launch a “Pilot Success” Checklist: Create a simple checklist to ensure each pilot has a clear scope, timeline, and outcome goals.
  • Collect Pilot Feedback Early: Use short surveys or interviews to gather team experiences within the first 2-3 weeks of testing.
To move from Experimentation to “Lifting-Off”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including:
  • Promoting Your GenAI Solutions.
  • Enabling Client Adoption of Your GenAI Solutions.
  • Providing Targeted Client Training & Support.
  • Enabling Internal Adoption of Your GenAI Solutions.
  • Providing Targeted Team Member Training & Support.
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale.
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Evaluate pilot quality across scope clarity, engagement, and measurable outcomes.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Create repeatable pilot frameworks with clear entry/exit criteria and resource expectations.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Standardize how pilot learnings are captured, documented, and shared across teams.
  • Define Your Adoption & Scaling Plan: Create a structured roadmap for how GenAI solutions will be rolled out across teams, workflows, or business units.
  • Define Your Phased Implementation Plan: Identify which pilot outputs are ready for broader rollout and who will lead scaling.
  • Build Awareness and Finalize Enablers: Package pilot outputs-such as prompt templates, impact metrics, or case studies-for reuse.
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Publicize pilot successes and lessons learned to motivate future adopters and normalize experimentation.
To move from Lifting-Off to “Accelerating”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases.
  • Develop a Standard GenAI Pilot Framework: Codify scope templates, reporting formats, and post-pilot review processes.
  • Create a Pilot Playbook for Teams: Provide a guide covering how to plan, execute, and assess GenAI pilots with clear roles.
  • Integrate Pilot Reviews into Governance Routines: Require pilot outcomes to be reviewed in product or transformation forums.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers.
  • Run a Portfolio of Targeted Pilots: Launch focused pilots across functions to explore diverse use cases and maximize learning.
  • Support Pilots with Embedded Coaches or SMEs: Provide hands-on help during pilots to accelerate value realization.
  • Establish a Reuse Repository: Capture pilot artifacts (e.g., prompts, dashboards, comms) in a shared hub for scaling.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum.
  • Showcase High-Impact Pilots Org-Wide: Share key wins and learnings in town halls, newsletters, or internal case studies.
  • Recognize Pilot Teams and Champions: Celebrate teams that model strong execution and share their playbooks.
  • Track and Share Pilot-to-Scale Conversions: Highlight how successful pilots become enterprise-wide solutions.
The “Accelerating” stage represents “Target State” for many capabilities. “Breaking Away”, on the other hand, suggests that the specific capability represents a clear competitive advantage for your business.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine.
  • Embed Pilot Support into Existing Processes: Integrate pilot scoping and tracking into portfolio management or innovation cycles.
  • Make Pilot Launch a Standard Project Step: Require GenAI pilot testing before broader process redesigns or tool deployments.
  • Provide Self-Service Pilot Enablement Kits: Offer a one-stop-shop with templates, tools, and guidance to support autonomous pilot execution.
  • Leverage Automation: Use GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort.
  • Automate Pilot Intake and Review: Use forms or bots to route new pilot ideas and auto-assign support resources.
  • Track Pilot Impact Automatically: Connect usage and outcome data directly to dashboards that monitor pilot effectiveness.
  • Generate Post-Pilot Summaries with GenAI: Use tools to auto-draft pilot recaps, insights, and recommendations for next steps.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases.
  • Continuously Refresh Pilot Criteria and Templates: Adjust based on learnings, team feedback, and GenAI maturity.
  • Expand Pilot Program Reach Across the Org: Actively recruit new business units and functions to test GenAI opportunities.
  • Benchmark Pilot Outcomes Across Teams: Identify top-performing pilots and extract scalable patterns for enterprise rollout.

Key "Watchouts"

As you take action you’ll want to avoid:

  • Running pilots without clear goals: Ambiguous objectives make it difficult to assess success or determine next steps.
  • Under-supporting teams during pilots: Lack of hands-on help can lead to frustration, poor outcomes, or missed insights.
  • Ignoring what doesn’t work: Pilots should surface both wins and challenges-learning from failures is critical.
  • Allowing pilot outputs to go unused: If lessons and assets aren’t shared or scaled, pilots waste valuable momentum.
  • Overloading with too many disconnected pilots: A scattered approach can dilute focus, resources, and learning impact.

Targeted Benefits

While Supporting Internal Pilots to Sustain GenAI Adoption can be challenging, its benefits are clear and compelling, including:

  • Faster learning cycles: Pilots allow teams to test, learn, and adapt quickly in real environments.
  • Lower risk scaling: Controlled experimentation reduces the risk of widespread rollout missteps.
  • Greater confidence in GenAI tools: Pilots build belief by showing tangible results in specific contexts.
  • Higher quality enablement assets: Pilot outputs often generate templates, prompts, and case studies for reuse.
  • Stronger cross-functional collaboration: Pilots often connect tech, business, and enablement teams around shared outcomes.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

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