The planning manager did not send an angry email. She did what planners always do when a system does not do what it promised: she opened her old spreadsheet, copied the fields she trusted, and quietly rebuilt the workflow she had used for eleven years.
What the pilot actually tested
A pilot tests the model. It does not test the integration. Most enterprise AI pilots run on clean historical exports from the ERP, not live transactional data with schema inconsistencies inside an SAP or Oracle environment.
Why T&M contracts stop at failure point three
A vendor on a time-and-materials contract has no financial incentive to drive a program through all four failure points. A T&M contract defines completion, not outcomes.
Eight questions to run past a vendor before the deployment SOW is signed
Start with proof of production. Then ownership. Then the adoption loop. Finally, the money: what percentage of the vendor fee is contingent on a Finance-validated production outcome, not a go-live milestone?
If you are choosing who signs the deployment SOW, the eight questions above are the shortest path to a real answer. Run them past a partner that structures the work around outcome-staked AI delivery, and you will hear the difference in the first meeting.
