Most AI budgets are not lost to failure. They are lost to a project that never quite finishes — promising enough to keep funding, never good enough to deploy. The fix is structural: define the exit conditions before the first invoice.
Fund a question, not a system
The first phase should answer one question: is this achievable on this site, at this accuracy, for a cost that makes sense? That phase should be small, time-boxed and allowed to conclude no.
Write the success number down first
Before work starts, state the metric, the target and the acceptable false-alarm rate. Get the person who will use the system to agree to it. A target agreed after seeing the results is not a target, it is a negotiation.
- What is being detected or predicted, in one sentence
- The accuracy required for it to be useful, as a number
- The false-alarm rate the operators will tolerate
- What the operator does when the system fires
- The date the decision to continue or stop is made
Budget for data work, because it is most of the work
Collection, cleaning and labelling routinely consume more of the schedule than modelling. A plan that allocates most of the budget to model development is describing a project that has not been done before.
Separate pilot cost from run cost
The pilot number is the one that gets approved and the run number is the one that hurts. Ask for both up front: hardware refresh, hosting, monitoring, retraining, support. A vendor who cannot give you a five-year run cost has not built one before.
The most valuable sentence in a proposal is the one that says what happens if the pilot misses the target. If it does not appear, ask for it in writing.
Insist on an ugly early demo
A rough working version in week three tells you more than a polished deck in month three. It shows the real failure modes early, while there is still budget and time to react.
Plan the handover from day one
Who owns it after go-live, who retrains it, and what documentation comes with it. A system nobody in your organisation can operate is a subscription, not an asset.