AI Pilot Charter Template
A pilot without a charter is a demo with a budget. The charter forces the six decisions that determine whether a pilot can ever produce a deployment decision, and it is written before the first prompt.
| Field | What to Write | Example (invoice-coding copilot) |
|---|---|---|
| Workflow & owner | The specific recurring task and the single named person with authority to change how it is done. | Coding incoming supplier invoices to GL accounts; owner: AP team lead. |
| Baseline | Current cost, cycle time, and error rate, measured, not guessed, over a defined period. | 4,100 invoices/month; 6 min avg handling; 2.9% coding-error rate (April audit). |
| Success metric & threshold | The one number that triggers a scale decision, and the level it must reach. | ≥95% of AI-suggested codes accepted unchanged; handling time under 2 min. |
| Eval set | Where the golden examples come from and how many (see A.2). | 60 real invoices from last quarter, incl. 15 known-tricky cases; correct codes from senior clerk. |
| Permission line | What the system may do alone vs. what requires a human, stated as actions. | Suggests code + confidence; clerk approves. No auto-posting in pilot. |
| Kill criteria & review date | The evidence that ends the pilot, and the date the decision meeting is already on calendars. | <85% acceptance after two prompt iterations, or any hallucinated vendor data; review June 30. |
The two fields teams resist are the baseline and the kill criteria, and they are the two that matter: without a baseline no result can be interpreted, and without pre-agreed kill criteria no pilot ever dies, it just fades into the 90-percent graveyard Chapter 2 described.
This template is part of the FDE Toolkit in GenAI for Business. The method behind it is in Chapter 14: Working Like a Forward Deployed Engineer.