GenAI Pilot to Production Consulting

They fail because they indexed data they cannot permission, they have no golden set, they have no traces, and nobody owns cutover. A demo that works on ten examples is not production. ReinforcedX treats production as permissions, shadow-mode, CI gates, and a runbook. If week one shows the workflow cannot be bounded, we kill the pilot instead of stretching it into a year-long “hardening” myth.

List the gaps, rebuild in the client’s cloud if the pilot lived in a sandbox, add live entitlements, stand up golden sets and CI, run shadow-mode, then cut over. That is the four-week standard when the workflow is well bounded. Financial-services governed paths typically take 8–12 weeks; healthcare 10–14; ecommerce 6–10. Book /demo with the pilot and the intended write path.

It is implementation against an existing demo: close the production gaps, evaluate, hand over artifacts, and stay on-call for 30 days. You own weights, datasets, eval suites, and runbooks. Pricing is a platform subscription plus a fixed-scope fee quoted before week one. Inference is billed by you to the provider; no token markup. The same terms are on /faq.

Almost never. Notebooks and Custom GPTs lack reconstructable traces, CI gates, and entitlement-aware retrieval. We keep the prompt and the lessons; we do not promote the notebook. Model-agnostic production can still call Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, or your fine-tune — behind permissions and evals. /how-to covers the self-serve version of that rebuild.

Four weeks for a well-bounded workflow that already has a real process owner. If the pilot has no metric, no data permissions, and no engineer to inherit it, week one is a stop. Heavier regulated reviews add calendar because governance is heavier. Thirty days on-call follow handover. We will not quote “phase two in Q4” to hide missing gates.

A golden set of real cases, rubric judges for the failure modes that matter, and CI gates that block deploy when the suite is red. Shadow-mode in week three scores live traffic against that suite. If you need the system shape for evaluation itself, see /ai-systems. Anecdotal thumbs-up from the pilot users is not a gate.

The process owner named in week one, after the eval suite is green, with security already having reviewed permissions in design. We staff one owner plus one engineer and a weekly 45-minute review. A committee that was not in design cannot “approve” a red suite. Data stays in your cloud; it is not used to train shared models.

Then we say so in discovery. A pilot without a metric, without permissionable data, or without an owner should not consume a four-week build. We would rather decline than launder a dead pilot into production. That honesty is part of the quote you get before week one, and it is consistent with the kill-criteria language on /faq.