AI Experimentation & Innovation Lab Playbook
- Practitioner
- Intermediate
- Template Included
- Workshop Ready
A practical playbook for running an AI experimentation function, using a three-gate funnel, pilot templates, and a worked retail example that shows how to kill weak ideas fast and scale strong ones.
Isn't killing most pilots a sign the lab is failing?
No — a high kill rate at the Explore and Pilot gates, especially early, is what a working filter looks like. If your lab is scaling nearly everything it pilots, it's likely either testing ideas that were never genuinely uncertain or quietly avoiding hard kill decisions, both of which are worse outcomes than an honest kill rate.
How do we set success criteria for something genuinely novel where we don't have a baseline?
Use a proxy or a manual-process baseline — as in the grocery example, "beat the manual audit process by X%" is a workable criterion even without historical AI performance data. The goal is a number the sponsor agrees in advance would justify scaling, not a perfectly calibrated target.
What happens to the pilot team's work if an idea gets killed?
Document the learnings and the reason for the kill in the Pilot Scorecard and archive the pilot's data and code. Killed pilots are common inputs to future Explore Gate reviews — a kill for weak data availability today can become a viable pilot in a year once that data gap closes.
Should the lab report to IT, a business unit, or a central innovation function?
This playbook is reporting-structure agnostic, but the gate review committee should always include both technical and business-unit representation regardless of where the lab formally sits, since Scale Gate decisions require both technical feasibility and business ownership commitment.
How many pilots should be running at once?
Size the portfolio to your gate review capacity, not your idea backlog — a committee that can genuinely score 4-6 pilots thoroughly each month should run roughly that many, since the discipline of the framework depends on real attention at each gate, not just paperwork.
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