From AI audit to governed pilot

How a mid-market operator validated vendors, fixed data gaps, and shipped a customer-facing pilot in one quarter.

Leadership needed an independent read on AI claims before renewing enterprise contracts. We mapped workflows, flagged three high-risk data paths, and scoped a pilot that customer support could actually run. The goal was not to “pick a model”—it was to know what to trust, what to defer, and what to pilot with clear rollback. Weekly working sessions kept sales, support, and IT aligned so procurement did not outrun implementation capacity.

Challenge

Multiple teams had adopted point solutions with overlapping capabilities. Legal was concerned about training data leaving the CRM; ops was skeptical of another “AI initiative” without metrics. Vendor demos showed happy-path tickets, but the real queue mixed billing edge cases, partner escalations, and incomplete CRM fields—any pilot had to survive that reality or not launch at all.

Approach

Two-week readiness audit across support, sales ops, and IT—interviews, data flow diagrams, and vendor contract review.
Prioritized roadmap: defer one redundant tool, consolidate on a single inference provider for the pilot, add human review queues.
Built integration spec and acceptance tests with internal engineering; Eccordia paired on prompt sets, eval rubrics, and escalation playbooks.
Facilitated executive readout: trade-offs between build, buy, and hybrid—so budget conversations tied to milestones, not slogans.

Outcomes

Board-ready audit memo with explicit go/no-go criteria per workstream.
Pilot live for tier-1 support tier with CSAT tracking and rollback in under one hour.
Internal owners named for model updates, with documented review cadence.
Vendor shortlist narrowed from six to two with shared scoring rubric used by IT and business leads.

Stack & constraints

CRM + helpdesk integrations; evaluation harness for response quality; no customer PII in model training.