Discovery & Pilot

Clarify the business reason for AI and select focused pilots that produce useful evidence.

Begin AI transformation with focused discovery and pilots. Connect the business question to early evidence across the six dimensions before committing to a larger intervention.

The transformation focus

Discovery & Pilot turns broad interest in AI into a clear business reason and a focused set of opportunities. Start with the outcomes the organization wants to influence, then examine real decisions, delays, manual effort, customer needs and employee needs. The initial opportunity set should be grounded in business work and the conditions that could enable or constrain it.

Use all six dimensions to make the starting position visible. Record strengths, gaps, dependencies and evidence confidence for the selected work. Different capabilities can show different maturity patterns; a single organizational score would hide the constraints that matter for the next decision. Select a small set of pilots with explicit value hypotheses, named owners and learning objectives.

Each pilot needs a bounded operating and learning design: outcome, workflow or decision, users, data and systems, AI participation, human responsibility, authority, guardrails and success evidence. A cross-functional team can initially carry several documented role hats. Progress means having enough clarity to test and learn through controlled action while keeping material assumptions visible.

Evidence to make visible

• Clear strategic intent and a prioritized opportunity set
• Named pilot owners, hypotheses and operating boundaries
• Visible capability constraints and learning needs

Decisions to make explicit

• Which business outcomes and opportunity hypotheses should guide early exploration?
• Which small pilot set can produce meaningful evidence within explicit boundaries?
• Which assumption or capability constraint needs the next focused test?

The question to examine

Can you explain what you will test, why it matters and what you need to learn?

Avoid these misreadings

• A complete discovery deck does not demonstrate readiness without a focused evidence-producing next step.
• The enterprise starting position cannot be reduced to one score that hides material capability gaps.

Use all six dimensions.

Examine the same enterprise situation through Alignment, Impact, Data, Integration, Values and Ethics. The phase describes the dominant context; individual capabilities and value streams can develop unevenly.

Framework source

Editorial adaptation from the supplied AIDIVE Version 1 master documents.

• AIDIVE Architecture & Rhythm - Maturity Version-1.docx — §1.1 Phase 1; §1.2 Progression Governance

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