One pilot. One decision.
Two to three weeks.
A fixed-fee review of one AI pilot or agent with a real executive decision attached. Depilot diagnoses and designs the path forward. Your team or implementation partner owns the build.
How the three weeks run
Week 1 - the decision and the evidence. We fix the decision this review serves: what must be decided, by whom, and by when. Then we collect what exists - metrics, cost data, evaluation artifacts, logs, incident history, and the current production claim.
Week 2 - the system in its workflow. Interviews across engineering, operations, and the sponsoring executive. Real cases traced end to end, from input to outcome to human touch. The pilot is examined where it actually lives, not where it demos.
Week 3 - the verdict. A written kill, fix, or scale decision. The first failed gate and the evidence behind it. A business and technical bottleneck map. The specifications for the gates ahead. A 90-day recommendation, delivered as an executive readout.
What the review needs from you
- One built or funded pilot or agent, with a decision attached to it
- Access to metrics, cost data, evaluation artifacts, and incident history
- An architecture walkthrough and access to 4-6 people across engineering, operations, and the sponsoring team
- A decision date. A review without a decision attached is a status report.
The six production gates
Every verdict and every path forward is expressed in these gates. Each gate names the evidence required and the condition that stops release.
Evaluation
Evidence: an oracle that scores outputs against the real workflow, run against every change before it ships. Not a demo set. Not vibes. A measurement the business would accept in a dispute.
Stops release when: nobody can prove, with data, whether the system is getting better or worse.
Release
Evidence: written thresholds for performance, exposure, and blast radius, agreed while the stakes are low. A first release small enough to survive being wrong.
Stops release when: the bar moves after every demo, because it was never fixed.
Ownership
Evidence: one named senior owner of the outcome and the budget, with the authority to say go and the authority to say stop.
Stops release when: responsibility belongs to a committee, and every sentence about it starts with "we".
Human control
Evidence: a written escalation spec - what triggers a human, what that human may decide, how fast they must respond, and what happens by default when they do not.
Stops release when: "human in the loop" is a phrase, not a mechanism.
Rollback
Evidence: a tested path back to the prior state, inside a named time, rehearsed before it is needed.
Stops release when: rollback is assumed rather than tested.
Kill switch
Evidence: a non-engineer can stop the system, knows when to, and has practiced. Shutdown is part of the product, not an incident afterthought.
Stops release when: stopping the system requires the team that built it.
What you receive
- A written kill, fix, or scale verdict, signed and argued
- The first failed production gate and the evidence behind it
- A business and technical bottleneck map
- The minimum path forward for architecture, data, workflow, and ownership
- Specifications for evaluation, release, human escalation, rollback, and kill-switch gates
- A 90-day recommendation and an executive readout
What you do not receive
- A development team
- Open-ended transformation consulting
- System implementation or ongoing operations
- A recommendation biased toward more build work
Depilot takes no implementation fees and no vendor referral fees. The verdict has no financial interest attached.
Fit, and honest non-fit
For: PE-backed and mid-market companies with funded pilots stuck before production, and Series B-D product teams preparing customer-facing agents. Strongest where the workflow is consequential - customer-facing, regulated, or operationally load-bearing.
Not for: idea-stage teams, buyers seeking a development shop, or policy-only governance reviews with no live system to examine.
Common questions
Does Depilot implement the recommendations?
Not today. Depilot's role is the independent diagnosis, the decision, and the gate design. Your internal team or chosen implementation partner owns the build and ongoing operation. Depilot can brief that team on the review, but does not take over delivery.
What if the answer is to stop?
That is a successful outcome. You receive the evidence for the decision, what would need to change before reconsideration, and where the budget or team can be redirected.
Is this a responsible-AI policy review?
No. The review focuses on whether one real system can produce value safely and reliably in its actual workflow. Policy matters only where it changes the production decision.
Before you book
If you want a fast read first, the 4-minute PROOF Scorecard scores one pilot across five production gates and names the weakest one. If you want the failure patterns in writing, the Failure Notes walk through them one mechanism at a time.
Bring one pilot and one decision.
In 30 minutes, we identify the decision your team is avoiding and test the five production gates. If a full review is useful, you leave with a clear scope. If it is not, I will say so.
Book a private pilot triage