Escaping Pilot Purgatory: The Right Way to Incorporate AI into Your Business

Stop me if this sounds familiar:

You’ve got a dozen AI pilots or “test-and-learns” running.

One in paid media. One in sales enablement. One in email optimization. The CIO is building something in-house. The CRO is trying Salesforce AI. The CEO is on stage talking about GenAI transformation. Internally, it looks like ... progress ... maybe? After all: There sure is “lots of AI happening.” But the day-to-day of your business? Not so easy to see the progress.

For lots of common and very boring reasons, it still takes you a lot longer than it should just to launch a campaign. Which is fine, because sales says the marketing content still doesn’t help. Meanwhile, the analytics team is swamped. And the client team is doing their own thing.

We see this so often at VShift, we named it: Pilot Purgatory. The illusion you have a lot going on and therefore must be accomplishing something meaningful. Yay, progress!

Pilot Purgatory is where momentum goes to die. Because most marketing teams aren’t struggling with ambition. They’re struggling with traction. They’ve launched experiments. They’ve bought tools. They’ve gone to the conferences.

But what they haven’t done is pull it all together into something coherent. Something that’s not only innovative but, more important, integral. Not just the illusion of progress for its own sake. But something that matters a whole lot to your business and solves a problem and / or seizes an opportunity that everyone up-and-down the org chart readily recognizes as something that matters. If you’ve lived through a tech revolution or two, you already know the hard part of AI very much is not the tech.

It’s the business context. (It’s always the business context.) The how do we decide where to apply this?

The who actually owns this?

The what are we trying to make easier, faster or better – and for whom? When those questions aren’t answered, you get scattered wins and a creeping sense of “Shouldn’t this be accomplishing a whole lot more than it is?”

Say it with me, because I know you’ve been asked: “What’s our AI strategy?” A more relevant question would be: Where are we stuck?

Internally ... Where are the decisions too slow? The handoffs too clunky? Where are we bleeding time, money or trust – because our systems weren’t built for what we’re asking them to do?

Externally ... Where are customers waiting too long? Where are they receiving generic messages instead of relevant ones? Where are they dropping off? Where are we missing chances?

The organizations that are making real progress with AI aren’t the ones with the most cohesive technology roadmap or the most systems integrated. They’re the ones who’ve shifted the focus from tools to traction. They’re thinking more like designers – of workflows, decision systems and intelligent assistants that help real people do high-value work.

This is what Agentic Thinking is about. Yes, it’s a framework. But it’s also a lens.

The Agentic Thinking framework says: Let’s stop plugging in AI and hoping for change. Let’s start with the points of friction that matter most – where effort and impact are out of sync – and design the workflow, tools and behaviors that unlock value.

For marketing leaders ready to stop piloting and start progressing, Agentic Thinking is where traction happens.

Want to get more structured with your strategy? If your AI efforts feel disconnected – or if you know there’s more potential than progress – it might be time for a different approach.

VShift AI helps organizations shift from scattered experiments to strategic momentum. We work with marketing and digital leaders to define the high-leverage opportunities, rewire workflows and build AI solutions that actually scale.

In other words, it’s less about making AI successful. And more about making your business successful.