Don’t Let Your AI Proof of Concept End With the Demo

Don’t Let Your AI Proof of Concept End With the Demo

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

In a September 24 letter to The Wall Street Journal, Sparq CEO Ingrid Curtis makes an important distinction between experimenting with AI and being ready to deploy it enterprise-wide. “A successful pilot proves little,” she writes. AI earns trust when it performs reliably “within the messy reality of a working business.”

One widely circulated 2025 statistic, based on IDC research for Lenovo (and reported by CIO), suggested that 88% of AI proofs of concept (PoCs) fail to result in widespread deployment. BCG reported in late 2024 that 74% of companies struggle to achieve and scale value from AI. But deployment may not be the only measure of a successful PoC. What did the organization learn from the experiment, and what happened to that knowledge?

Curtis argues that companies need to better prepare their AI applications, data, infrastructure, systems, and employees for that reality. I would add that the two most important contributors to this preparation are documentation and communication.

In my last two posts, I’ve focused primarily on external content—and the AI-mitigated audiences that interact with it. But demand for enterprise-ready AI is also creating demand for important internal content: the knowledge organizations generate as they experiment with the technology.

That knowledge shouldn’t disappear when the PoC ends.

An internal AI PoC is not complete when an organization determines whether the technology can perform as expected. It is complete when the organization documents, communicates, and applies what it learned to the decisions that come next.

Documentation creates organizational memory. Communication creates organizational knowledge. Both are essential if an AI PoC is going to become more than a successful experiment.

In this blog post, I answer these questions:

  • What is an AI PoC?
  • How can AI PoC documentation capture knowledge?
  • How can communication about AI PoC findings serve future efforts?
  • What kind of organizational knowledge can an AI PoC yield?
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Effective Content in the AI Era: Thriving in a Three-Force Audience Ecosystem

Effective Content in the AI Era: Thriving in a Three-Force Audience Ecosystem

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

When I created the Three-Force Audience Model for my July blog post, I focused on the endpoints.

The reader. The AI system. The community.

But afterward, I found myself thinking more about the spaces between them.

After all, these forces don’t operate independently. A reader asks an AI system a question. Someone brings the AI-generated answer into a professional discussion. That community discusses, challenges, or reinforces the idea and seeks further sources. Each interaction can change how information is understood—and what happens to it next.

That makes the spaces between the endpoints at least as interesting as the endpoints themselves.

So, for this follow-up, I went back to the Three-Force Audience Model and added arrows to represent the multi-way interactions among the three forces.

What they reveal is a more dynamic picture of today’s content environment—and some important implications for those of us who create and manage content.

How the Three Audience Forces Interact

The audience ecosystem I introduced last month should move us, as content creators, beyond the notion of a single audience type for our content. Instead, our content exists within an ecosystem shaped by three very different audience forces.

Given that, we must accept that there is no single type of interaction with our content—or even a single audience flow. Audiences interact with our content at any point along their journeys to or from it. As they do, they can add meaning that, in turn, can help us improve and even expand the original concept.

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Rethinking Content Audiences in the AI Era: The Three-Force Audience Model

Rethinking Content Audiences in the AI Era: The Three-Force Audience Model

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

Thanks to a recent experience, I’ve been thinking about how the audience for my content has changed—and how, in some ways, it has stayed the same.

During a recent group book discussion, one of my friends asked me to characterize the university students I taught in the mid-1990s and compare them with today’s students. Those students lived in a very different information environment. Access to knowledge was slower, more deliberate, and often mediated through libraries, instructors, and printed materials.

Today’s students inhabit an ecosystem where information is abundant, instantly searchable, algorithmically recommended, and increasingly summarized before it is ever read.

These changes don’t simply alter how people consume information. They change what it means to be an audience.

The traditional idea of a content audience as a stable set of personas or demographic segments no longer reflects how people encounter information online. Today, content consumption is shaped by three interacting forces: the individual reader, the AI system that discovers, summarizes, or interprets the content, and the community that shares, evaluates, or discusses it.

This shift requires content professionals to think differently.

Read on to learn about these three forces and how today’s content creators and managers can best work with the emerging challenges:

  • Three Forces Now Shape Content Consumption
  • Beyond Designing for AI Summaries: What a Blended Approach Really Adds
  • Solving the Audience Conundrum: What Content Professionals Can Do
  • A New Focus: The Audience Ecosystem
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Life Lessons in Leadership

Life Lessons in Leadership

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

The U.S. semiquincentennial has me reflecting on the lessons my life’s experiences have taught me about leadership. Full disclosure: I have recently started writing a memoir. So, my reflection isn’t rooted solely in the country’s historical milestone.

My memoir spans my early teen years, during which I discovered that I carry the burden of the family health curse: migraine disorder. Not that uncommon, as one in five women in the U.S. has this disorder. But add into the mix a military family, the early 1970s, the Vietnam War, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and you have some drama.

More to come on that.

For now, let me say that my background colors my views on what makes a good leader. Those views were further refined by my experiences as a teacher, technical communicator, and program manager. Then they were topped off by my experiences as a community volunteer and non-profit board member.

Now, at the memoir stage of my life, which coincides with an extraordinary time in my country’s history, I share some comprehensive thoughts on leadership.

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Human-in-the-Loop as a Leadership Practice: A Framework for Better AI Workflows

Human-in-the-Loop as a Leadership Practice: A Framework for Better AI Workflows

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

A shift is underway that has implications for leaders developing AI-assisted workflows. In recent months, even some technology leaders have begun revisiting an idea that once seemed unfashionable: the enduring value of the humanities. As AI becomes more capable, qualities often associated with disciplines like psychology, philosophy, and literature are being reframed as professional advantages rather than academic luxuries.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, columnist Maureen Dowd explored the renewed interest among AI technologists in liberal arts education. In the piece, sources suggest that a deeper understanding of human behavior, ethics, history, and enduring narrative themes might help younger professionals gain an edge in an AI-rich workplace. The notion is striking: the more sophisticated AI becomes, the more valuable distinctly human capabilities become.

The implications for leaders engaged in workflow design or redesign run deeper than the superficialities sometimes associated with Human-in-the-loop (HITL).

In this space, I have written about HITL as a safeguard for ensuring human judgment remains central to AI-assisted work. In a previous blog post, I argued that effective HITL requires cognitive friction—intentional pauses for questioning, verification, and reflection that are distinct from mere review and approval.

The challenge for today’s leaders is twofold: First, to ensure meaningful human engagement in AI-assisted workflows; and second, to ensure that humans drive the continuous improvement of those workflows.

That is where HITL as a leadership practice comes in.

In this blog post, I offer a practical HITL leadership model—a repeatable process for keeping human engagement intentional, your team’s relationship with AI collaborative, and AI-assisted workflows continuously improving.

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