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Stage-Gate

A funding model in which work is released in stages, and each stage must pass a review against criteria set in advance before the next tranche of money is approved.

AI Strategy

A stage-gate process breaks an investment into stages separated by decision points. At each gate, a review compares the evidence so far with criteria written before the stage began, and decides whether to continue, change course or stop. Robert Cooper described the model for new product development in 1990, and government gateway reviews apply the same idea to major public projects.

For AI, the gate matters most at the end of the pilot. Pilots are cheap to start and politically hard to stop, so without a fixed review date and written kill criteria they tend to be extended indefinitely. A gate turns stopping into a routine decision with a record.

A useful health check is the stop rate. A portfolio in which no pilot has ever failed a gate usually means the gates are not being used.

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AI Strategy

A Joint CFO–CAIO Framework for AI Benefit Realisation

Most AI programmes cannot prove what they returned because nobody recorded the starting point, nobody agreed how to separate the AI's effect from everything else, and the running cost sits in a cloud bill no one maps to a use case. A framework the CFO and the Chief AI Officer run together: baselines, attribution, inference cost accounting and stage-gates that stop funding for pilots that miss their targets.

AI Strategy

The Lean Way to Build AI: Small Bets, Real Evidence, Fewer Failed Pilots

Most AI programmes fail the same way products used to fail, by betting big before anyone tested the smallest version of the idea. Here is how Lean's build-measure-learn discipline makes AI adoption safer.