For a first pilot, we recommend a small task with a visible result: preparing a draft reply, extracting fields for review or finding an answer in approved documents. Make the expected outcome specific enough that someone can judge it.
The question to answer is whether the workflow becomes more useful after review time, corrections and operating costs are included. A polished demonstration alone cannot answer that.
Decide what the pilot may do
Write down the input, the permitted information sources, the expected output and the person responsible for accepting it. Keep sending messages or changing business records behind an explicit review step during the initial pilot.
Define an ordinary fallback for missing information or a failed response. Staff should be able to finish the task without having to repair the AI workflow first.
Evaluate examples from the actual task
Build a small evaluation set that includes typical work, incomplete requests and difficult cases. Use only data approved for the chosen environment. Ask a reviewer to mark whether each result is correct, supported by its sources and useful for the next action.
Microsoft Foundry’s evaluation guidance distinguishes quality and safety evaluation, tracing and production monitoring. We recommend applying that same separation: inspect the answer, understand how it was produced and watch how the deployed workflow behaves.
Sources and release notes: [1]
Make expansion an evidence-based decision
Compare the complete task with the existing process, including human review. Set the decision criteria before the pilot starts and record the cases where it fails. Our suggested measures are:
Expand only when the team can explain the recurring failures and manage them. Keep the evaluation set for future model or prompt changes, and assign someone to review problems after launch.
- Time to an accepted result, including corrections.
- The share of outputs accepted and the types of errors found.
- Operating cost and the effort of maintaining the workflow.
Sources and release notes
Original analysis by AtmosGate, based on the sources below. Vendor claims and release status are attributed to their publishers.