Lesson 4: Escaping Pilot Hell
Most industrial pilots never convert.
Especially hotly-tipped AI solutions that promise to accelerate the path to clean, competitive production at scale. McKinsey reported in 2025 that 70–90% of AI agents in industry fail to reach full deployment, and the pattern holds true across industrial software more broadly.
Organisations across nearly every function remain stuck in perpetual pilot purgatory.
This often isn’t a technology problem. It’s a momentum problem. The difference between pilots that stall and pilots that scale comes down to what happens before and during the pilot stage.
Here, we share founder-to-founder insights from operators who’ve navigated this transition successfully many times.
And the pattern is clear: successful pilots are built on foundations laid well before the technology reaches the shop floor.
First, find the right partner
If you’ve built something customers truly need, you will attract interest from many directions. That often translates into a long list of potential pilot opportunities.
But in early-stage industrial go-to-market, saying yes too easily is dangerous. It creates pilot clutter, drains your team’s time, and almost always leads to disappointing conversions.
The discipline of qualifying ruthlessly is what separates pilots that scale from pilots that stall.
Effective qualification begins with understanding whether a pilot has real potential to generate value. That means looking at ROI, the urgency of the operational pain, and whether the problem fits squarely within your strategic focus.
It also means assessing the partner itself.
Here are some questions to help you check your potential pilot partner is appropriate:
- Baseline technical requirements: Are they digitally mature enough to use your software and adapt their processes?
- Engagement: Are they ready to invest time up front -whether in a two-day or two-week exploratory session -to understand what success would look like?
- High-Level Interest: Is there someone at the executive level pushing for digital impact, rather than treating the pilot as a side experiment?
- Incentive Alignment: Does your product’s offering naturally align with the company’s critical KPIs?
ICP Match: Does the customer reflect the patterns of your emerging ideal customer profile in terms of environment, industry, and problem type?
Engage the Right Stakeholders
Beyond choosing the right company, you also need to ensure you’re engaging with the right people inside that company. Pilots often succeed technically yet fail to convert simply because the wrong stakeholder was driving them.
Focus on the “Operational Buyer”. A pilot will only lead to meaningful adoption if it is championed by an operational buyer - someone who can assess the impact of your solution in practice, holds or directly influences the budget, and has the authority to approve a full enterprise subscription once the pilot demonstrates its worth.
If you’re unsure who that person is, revisit Chapter Two, where we break down how decision-making actually works inside large industrial organisations.
Avoid Pilots with Innovation Departments. Pilots often run by innovation teams with no real rollout mandate. Innovation budgets are generally meant to empower employees to explore innovation and test solutions. However, these pilots often lack strategic alignment with the broader organisational goals, making them less likely to result in full-scale rollouts.
→ FOUNDER TIP: Maintain One Key Account Manager Throughout the Pilot. Continuity is critical. Assign a single key account manager to own the relationship from the very beginning of the pilot through to conversion. This avoids the friction that often arises when Sales hands over to Customer Success and ensures a consistent, professional experience for the customer.
A well-run pilot, supported by steady relationship ownership, clear contracts, and hands-on service, significantly increases the likelihood of conversion and lays the groundwork for multi-site expansion.
Frame the Pilot as the First Step in a Larger Partnership
One of the most common mistakes founders make is treating a pilot as a technical experiment rather than the opening chapter of a long-term collaboration.
It sounds obvious but too often pilots begin without a shared vision of what happens next, which leaves even successful implementations stuck in limbo.
The framing matters. Your job is to articulate how the pilot connects directly to the organisation’s strategic goals-how a strong result moves the business closer to improved throughput, reduced emissions, higher efficiency, or whatever matters most to leadership.
By the time you enter pilot mode, senior stakeholders should already have a clear picture of what a company-wide rollout looks like. Operators can validate results, but they rarely have the authority to drive expansion. That’s why executive buy-in must come first.
The pilot is not proof that your technology works; it is a validation step within a top-down strategic journey that leadership has already endorsed.
When framed in this way, the pilot gains internal importance, clear expectations, and urgency -making it far more likely to convert.
Set Expectations Upfront
Clear success criteria are essential. Define what outcomes matter, how they will be measured, over what timeframe, and what the next step will be if those criteria are met. This avoids the ambiguity that leads to endless “yes, but…” debates after a pilot ends.
Expansion logic should be defined upfront as part of the deal, both to create clarity and to ensure serious customer engagement. This typically includes:
- Clear success criteria -specific metrics or outcomes that determine whether the pilot has achieved its goals.
- A defined timeframe for conversion to full rollout, ideally supported by an LOI that outlines the expected next steps.
- Pre-negotiated pricing for the next phase, so commercial discussions don’t start from scratch after the pilot.
A unilateral right for the customer to terminate if the pilot fails to meet the agreed criteria, which de-risks the commitment while keeping the path to rollout intact.
It also gives the customer a sense of direction: they are not participating in a vague experiment but progressing through a structured decision-making process.
When expectations are aligned from the outset, the path to rollout becomes much clearer, and the likelihood of internal sponsorship increases dramatically.
Structure & Price Contracts to Make Conversion the Default Outcome
Contract design plays a disproportionately large role in whether pilots convert. A well-structured contract makes full deployment the natural next step, while a loosely framed one invites drift and indecision.
The most effective approach is to build contracts that transition directly into a commercial SaaS relationship once milestones are met.
Of course, include a break clause if the criteria are not achieved to de-risk the decision for the customer, but otherwise make the contract forward-moving.
Paid pilots are a powerful signal of seriousness. Corporates do not lack budget; they have limited attention and time to roll out. When customers pay, even modestly, they engage more deeply and allocate resources with intent.
Additionally, implementation fees, usually in the range of 10–15% of TCV, serve two purposes: they signal seriousness and help cover the cost of customer acquisition.
They also give you room to manoeuvre in negotiations, since waiving the fee can be offered as a high-perceived-value concession.
Note: the main exception to paid pilots is co-development work. In these cases, corporates often view their internal resources as a form of opportunity cost. They may be willing to pay once a product is developed and delivering results, but at the proof-of-concept stage the commercial exchange should reflect what they are contributing — payment may come in the form of access, data, exclusivity, or another valuable concession.
Example: After having run a handful of successful pilots with their customers, Carbon Re began to offer direct contracts with customers with break clauses and clearly defined criteria during the rollout phase rather than pilots.
Identify When to Call it Quits
And finally, not every pilot is worth pursuing indefinitely. Some customers become trapped in perpetual pilot mode, showing enthusiasm but never building the internal momentum needed for real adoption.
The earlier you can recognise this pattern, the more effectively you can focus your energy elsewhere.
Letting go of these outliers is often the smartest choice. Every hour spent trying to revive a stagnant pilot is an hour not spent helping committed customers scale quickly.
Prioritising the partners who are ready to move unlocks faster growth and far better use of your resources.
→ FOUNDER TIP: A useful signal is engagement. Track whether the right users are logging in, how frequently they return, and whether usage is expanding beyond the initial champions. If engagement stalls despite repeated support, the organisation may simply not be ready to move forward -regardless of how well the technology performs.
Up next: Post Sales Implementation: Productising the Deployment
In industrial software, early deployments often look more like consulting than SaaS. Complex, asset-heavy environments demand hands-on work, custom integration, and deep user engagement. That’s normal to start with but the real risk is staying in that mode and becoming a “services company in disguise.” In the next chapter, we explore how to design for repeatability.
STAY TUNED!
You are reading our Manufacturing Software GTM Founder Guide for early-stage b2b manufacturing Saas founders. Read our intro here. With thanks to Sid Khullar (Aris Machina), Maximilian von Düring (AiSight), Alex Grots (Proglove), Yohann Rousselet (BAC), Sabine Erlinghagen (Siemens Grid), Matthias auf der Mauer (Juna.ai), Thibauld Martin (Altrove), Omar Fergani and Josh Vernon (Carbon Re).
Authors: Jess Burley, Kim Dang, Christoph Gras, Sam Baker.
← READ PREVIOUS CHAPTER: Scaling across plants
About us
Planet A is an early-stage European tech VC backing founders solving the world’s greatest systemic challenges. We use rigorous scientific impact assessments to identify solutions the world cannot afford to ignore. Investments include Carbon re, Aris Machina, AUAR, INERATEC, Makersite, C1, HIVED, traceless materials and 44.01. Follow us on LinkedIn for latest news, updates and resources.
