Escaping Pilot Purgatory

How one AI agent went from experiment to everyday operations
87% of marketers now use generative AI. Far fewer can point to results. The gap isn't about tools; it's that most AI efforts stall as experiments built outside real workflows, with no understanding of where the value is. They never leave pilot purgatory.

This session is a show-and-tell from the other side of that gap. Michael Shore will walk through a real AI agent built inside a working digital agency — the diagnostic process that identified the right use case, the decision to build it where the team already works, the artifacts it produces, and an accounting of the gap between the six-week plan and the four-month reality — and what that gap teaches about setting up pilots to succeed. From there we'll generalize the pattern into a repeatable approach any team can use to move from experimenting with AI to operating with it.

What you can expect to learn

• Why most marketing AI pilots fail, including an accounting of what went sideways in ours: we scoped six weeks, but it took four months.
• How to structure an AI pilot for success: covering setup decisions, scope, decision cadence, data access, and ownership.
• A diagnostic method for finding the highest-value AI use case in your team's actual workflows, before choosing any tool.
• What a production AI agent looks like inside a real marketing operation: inputs, outputs, and maintenance realities.

About Michael Shore

Michael Shore has spent 16 years in performance marketing, analytics, and marketing operations both in-house and agency-side. He's worked with brands including Walmart, LinkedIn, Twilio, UNIQLO, and BELLA+CANVAS. He now works at the intersection of marketing operations and applied AI, embedding with marketing teams and agencies to find where AI fits their real workflows and building working systems in production — including a Slack-based AI agent currently handling reporting and account-review work inside a digital agency. He is a daily practitioner: Claude, Gemini, and custom agent workflows run large parts of his own business operations.

We hope to see you on Thursday, September 10 at 8:00 AM at Founder Central by Sweater in Boulder.

Please use the entrance with the mural, on the parking lot side of the building.