Creartful AIInsightsAgent pilots
Scoping an AI agent pilot: one job, one measure.
Most agent projects that disappoint were never scoped to give a clear answer. A good pilot is small on purpose: one job, tested against your own past work, judged by one measure you agreed before it started.
Pick one job.
Choose a task that repeats often, follows rules most of the time and has a clear finished state. Drafting replies to the five most common customer questions is a pilot. “Handle customer service” is not.
- It happens daily or weekly, so you get enough cases to judge
- A person already does it, so you have something to compare with
- Mistakes are caught before they reach anyone outside
Build a test set from real cases.
Before the agent runs on live work, collect past examples with known good answers. Anthropic’s engineering team suggests that 20 to 50 simple tasks drawn from real failures is a great start for an evaluation set.
They also recommend grading what the agent produced rather than the exact path it took, and keeping two kinds of tests: capability tests that start with a low pass rate to show room to improve, and regression tests that should pass almost every time, to catch backsliding after a change.
Agree one measure.
Pick the number that decides whether the pilot worked, and write it down before the pilot starts. It should be something your team already cares about.
Quality
Approved as drafted. The share of drafts a person approves without edits.
Time
Minutes per case. Compared with doing it by hand, review included.
Safety
Escalations. Cases it correctly handed to a person instead of guessing.
Run in draft-only mode.
During the pilot the agent prepares the work and a person does the final step. It is the safest way to see real behaviour on real cases, and it gives you the comparison you need: what the agent drafted against what the person sent.
Decide, and write it down.
At the end, compare the results with the measure. Go, change the scope and run again, or stop. Each is a good outcome if it is based on evidence. Whatever you decide, keep the test set: it is the foundation for every later change.
Sources.
How long should a pilot run?
Long enough to see a representative sample of cases, which depends on how often the task happens. Agree the length in the blueprint along with the measure.
What if the agent fails the pilot?
You learn which part failed: the data, the instructions, the tools or the task itself. Sometimes the answer is a simpler workflow instead of an agent.
Do we need special software for testing?
Not to start. A spreadsheet of past cases with the expected answers and a person grading the results is enough for a first pilot.
Ready to work together?
Start at the Origin Point.
The Origin Point is the discovery call: one conversation about your site, your tools and what you want automated.