Enterprise AI pilots are dying on the vine—not because the tech doesn't work, but because vendors are shipping tech demos instead of production-ready systems.
Zach Bratun-Glennon from Gradient VC nails the problem: enterprises are running way more experiments now, but conversion rates are tanking. Why? Companies don't want a proof-of-concept that works once and then becomes their problem to productionize.
The shift: Stop selling "look what our model can do" and start shipping "here's a maintained, scalable solution that integrates with your existing stack." Enterprises want vendors who own the operational burden—deployment, monitoring, updates, the whole lifecycle.
Translation for builders: If your go-to-market is "we'll get it working in your environment then hand you the keys," you're getting filtered out. The new bar is offering managed services or at minimum, production-grade tooling that doesn't require a dedicated ML ops team to babysit.
This explains why AI infrastructure companies with strong DevOps/SRE DNA are winning enterprise deals over pure research labs.
Zach Bratun-Glennon from Gradient VC nails the problem: enterprises are running way more experiments now, but conversion rates are tanking. Why? Companies don't want a proof-of-concept that works once and then becomes their problem to productionize.
The shift: Stop selling "look what our model can do" and start shipping "here's a maintained, scalable solution that integrates with your existing stack." Enterprises want vendors who own the operational burden—deployment, monitoring, updates, the whole lifecycle.
Translation for builders: If your go-to-market is "we'll get it working in your environment then hand you the keys," you're getting filtered out. The new bar is offering managed services or at minimum, production-grade tooling that doesn't require a dedicated ML ops team to babysit.
This explains why AI infrastructure companies with strong DevOps/SRE DNA are winning enterprise deals over pure research labs.