Shipping AI to production in six weeks

"We've had a pilot for eight months but we can't quite ship it." We hear this every week. Usually the problem is simple: the team doesn't know what "production" means for an AI system, so each time they get close, they find one more thing to fix.

Why pilots don't reach production

In our experience, the reasons are always the same:

• Scope creep. Every demo brings new ideas. Instead of parking them in a backlog, they enter the scope immediately.
• Unclear success criteria. The team doesn't know when they're "done" because nobody defined what "good enough" means.
• Production gap. The pilot runs on a laptop - production requires auth, logging, monitoring, rate limiting, rollback. That's often more work than the AI itself.
• Power vacuum. Nobody with authority owns the rollout.

The six-week framework

For a typical engagement we run:

Week 1 - Discovery sprint

Fixed scope. Two days of stakeholder calls, two days of data review, one day writing the plan. Output:

• Technical architecture (one page)
• Risk register
• Cost estimate (infrastructure + build + run)
• Success metrics
• Rollout strategy

Weeks 2–5 - Pilot and production in parallel

Here's where we differ from most agencies. We don't build a pilot "and then production." From the first commit, code goes into production infrastructure - just behind a feature flag.

Week 6 - Rollout and hand-off

Gradual rollout (5% → 25% → 100% traffic), training for your team, documentation, monitoring runbook.

What the six-week deadline changes

A hard deadline forces discipline. Things teams do "when they have time":

• Choosing between RAG, fine-tuning, and agentic approaches - becomes a pragmatic question, not an academic one.
• Testing with real users - happens before the pilot is "ready."
• Talking to legal - doesn't get postponed.
• Estimating cost - isn't discovered on the first invoice.

What it doesn't change

Six weeks does not mean we skip security, testing, or compliance. It means those steps are planned inside the window, not after.

If your pilot has dragged for months - maybe it's time for an external framework. Get in touch, 30 minutes.