A pilot can produce an impressive demonstration and still fail to answer the purchasing question. The missing element is often a measurement design agreed before anyone sees the results.
Executive summary
Choose a small set of operational workflows, establish their baseline and define acceptance criteria before introducing the software. Measure the time to a correct, usable result, not merely the time to the first generated answer. Keep product capability, staff adoption and commercial impact as separate findings.
The framework below is a proposed evaluation method. Its numerical example is hypothetical and does not represent a Bounty AI customer result. That separation is essential if the final investment case is to withstand a CFO’s review.
1. Build a baseline that survives comparison
Select recurring work with an observable finish
Good pilot candidates have a clear trigger and an agreed outcome. Examples include producing a reviewed daily report, answering a predefined revenue investigation and resolving the information gap in a payment-service case. Avoid defining success as “the team found AI useful” without specifying what changed.
- Record task complexity, data scope and the staff involved.
- Separate active handling time from elapsed waiting time.
- Count handovers, corrections and repeated requests.
- Preserve the reviewed result and the evidence used to approve it.
Prevent easier work from inflating the result
Match comparable tasks across the baseline and pilot. A month-end reconciliation is not equivalent to a routine daily total. Track upstream incidents, staffing changes and policy revisions that could explain a difference. Where practical, use a crossover design or a comparable team to help distinguish tool effects from normal variation.
Do not count time removed from one team if the work simply moves to another unmeasured team. Include data-engineering support, definition maintenance and exception review in the baseline and the pilot. The objective is to measure the workflow, not optimise one department’s reported handling time.