4 Hidden Reasons Why AI Pilots Stall — and What Leaders Must Do to Scale Fast

Today’s top AI challenge: Moving from pilot to enterprise-wide impact quickly

Teams are feeling more and more pressure as executives demand tangible results from AI investments. Faced with fast-moving markets, regulations, competitors, and technologies, boards and C-suites want to see real impact and big ROI — now.

But despite the pressure to show hard results, two-thirds of AI projects never leave the pilot phase, according to McKinsey.

The core issue isn’t AI capability; it’s that most pilots are built as isolated experiments rather than enterprise systems that drive outcomes across business functions. Enterprises spend time proving AI can work, but not enough time defining what the business needs and how to scale that impact across systems, teams, and processes.

Enterprises need speed, but speed at scale is elusive — here’s why

Speed is where AI projects drive much of their value. We see customers like Jemena cutting invoice processing time from eight days to same-day, KeyBank processing 40,000 documents autonomously, SoftBank reducing recruitment hours by 85%, and Masin cutting legal reviews from weeks to minutes.

But the real urgency isn’t task speed; it’s organizational speed: 90% of C-level executives say the pace of business change has accelerated this year, according to Accenture, and 84% expect the acceleration to continue. Unfortunately, only 42% feel prepared to react.

To complete, enterprises need AI’s speed at scale — that is, the ability to move from a successful AI pilot to orchestrating outcomes across the entire business. That’s where the majority of AI pilots stall. Here are four reasons why:

1. Capabilities and resources to get it done

Enterprises face a choice: build custom AI, rely on expensive consultants, or wait for vendors to add capabilities. That all takes time and resources.

Traditional approaches require building one-off automations or narrow AI features. These don’t scale or keep pace with evolving business needs, especially as AI advances at lightning speed, outstripping enterprises’ ability to rebuild continuously.

2. Governance to mitigate risks

For enterprises, governance and trust cannot be an afterthought, especially as AI moves to mission-critical processes. Explainability, auditability, security, controls, and compliance are table stakes.

Building governance manually, including AI guardrails, access controls, data masking, and policy enforcement, adds months to deployment timelines. As regulations such as SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 certifications, and other regulatory or industry requirements tighten, governance becomes a scalability bottleneck rather than an enabler of trust.

3. Technical infrastructure to make it work

The myriad integrations with legacy systems across the business seem simple when a human worker bounces between screens and apps. Building custom integrations between AI and core systems increases technical debt, slows deployments, limits reusability, blocks scalability, and adds maintenance overhead.

Unless the enterprise builds a full stack of connectors, context handling, and orchestration logic, AI pilots collapse because they solve only a small portion of a process and fail to span the full operational flow.

4. Collaboration to close the loop

Enabling human workers to collaborate with AI agents connects the enterprise scalability dots. The value rockets up when humans can provide context, judgment, and oversight.

But AI pilots frequently focus on narrow tasks, not end-to-end workflows that incorporate human exception handling, feedback loops, and iterative optimization. Without a system that supports continuous learning and multi-agent collaboration, scale becomes impossible.

The missing link: How agentic AI unlocks scale

Most pilots stall because they’re deployed as one-off projects to test AI features. AI agents offer a better approach because they operate independently across systems, serving as tools that work together to address complex business needs and can easily scale across the enterprise.

Agentic AI changes the operating model entirely by starting with a goal, using reasoning to determine the next best action, and moving across ERP, CRM, ITSM, custom apps, and other systems just like a seasoned employee would. Agents pull data from the right places, collaborate with humans in real time, and carry processes from start to finish.

Orchestrated agent-plus-human collaboration is what shifts AI from a collection of siloed automations to reusable, outcome-driven agentic systems that scale across the business. With the business objective as the starting point, agents are assembled and orchestrated to achieve that goal and accelerate pilot-to-production cycles.

Key questions to ask about governance, integrations, and collaboration

To help open the door to considering agentic AI solutions, here are three questions leaders of AI initiatives should ask:

How will you ensure proper governance? Gartner says only 35% of AI capabilities are built by IT, meaning most AI projects are outside established governance infrastructures. Agentic platforms include governance, security, and compliance capabilities to speed pilot-to-production cycles.

How will you build and maintain custom integrations with legacy ERP, CRM, and other systems? Follow up with questions on how stack complexity, multi-cloud infrastructures, hybrid work arrangements, remote teams, and dispersed systems increase the effort required. Agentic platforms include prebuilt libraries of enterprise connectors for fast integrations with common and niche business applications.

How will you facilitate collaborative human-agent systems that empower and elevate human workers?
While 70% of workers feel ready to work with agents, Accenture says just 27% of organizations are actively integrating agents across functions. Agentic platforms ease human-agent orchestration so humans can focus on decision-making, strategy, customer interactions, and other higher-value work.

If these questions are difficult to answer or raise even more questions, it’s a sign that traditional automation and isolated AI pilots aren’t enough. Instead, agentic solutions might be the better option. By combining goal-driven AI agents, existing automation, applications, and human experts to handle complex, multi-step processes end-to-end, enterprises can deploy high-impact solutions in days, not months. And, enterprises maintain control via built-in governance, guardrails, monitoring, and continuous learning and improvement.

In a world of tight margins and rising operational pressure, agentic solutions improve decision-making, reduce errors and delays, and expand the team’s capacity to drive the business forward.

Accelerate AI scale and impact with Automation Anywhere’s Agentic Solutions

To turn AI investments into measurable business value, organizations need more than AI features; they need agentic systems that scale.

Automation Anywhere’s Agentic Solutions deliver exactly that. Built on the industry-leading Agentic Process Automation (APA) System and powered by the Process Reasoning Engine (PRE), they transform fragmented, isolated processes into coordinated, outcome-driven workflows orchestrating across AI agents, humans, and systems end-to-end.

To speed deployments, Agentic Solution Blueprints can be deployed in just days for processes in finance, procurement, customer support, and other mission-critical areas. These add a no-code experience designed for non-developer operators, and with native connectors for seamless integrations with ERP, CRM, and ITSM systems.

And because APA was designed for enterprise environments, governance and safety are foundational, not added on. Native AI guardrails, access controls, data masking, audit trails, and continuous model evaluations ensure every agent operates responsibly and transparently.
 

Want to see our Agentic Solutions in action? Take a free test drive of our Agentic Solution for Accounts Payable.

Looking to accelerate pilots to production? Our Pilot-to-Production special offer offers a guided, accelerated path to realize real enterprise impact in as little as 90 days with our Agentic Solution for Accounts Payable. It includes expert support, measurable outcomes, and a clear roadmap to scale agentic solutions across your organization.