The challenge
Which pilots scale is a portfolio question.
Most enterprises now run more AI pilots than anyone can easily track. Every department has one, and most look promising. They all want the same scarce people: data engineers, ML specialists and the few architects who understand the platforms. The board wants to know which pilots will scale, what that will take, and what else will wait while they do.
That is not a question about models. Scaling a pilot means funding it, staffing it and fitting it around dependencies on data platforms and work already committed. When AI initiatives are tracked apart from the rest of the portfolio, each pilot looks affordable on its own. The trade-offs surface later, as overloaded teams and programs waiting on the same specialists.
Then there is AI inside planning itself. Portfolio data is among the most sensitive information a company holds: strategy, budgets, people. Security teams rightly ask where it goes and which model sees it. And planning math is the wrong job for a language model. Ask one to replan a large portfolio around a new capacity limit and the answer will sound confident, with no way to tell whether it is right.