Tag: Production
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Pilot Purgatory 3.0: When the Pilot Never Ends Because Nobody Wants to Own It
April 2027 | Samuel Sum In 2024, I wrote about pilot purgatory: the gap between a promising prototype and a deployed production system. In 2026, I wrote about pilot purgatory 2.0: the same problem, but with agents instead of models. Now it is 2027, and the problem has evolved again. Pilot purgatory 3.0…
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Pilot Purgatory in Machine Learning: Why Most Models Excel in Prototyping but Fail to Deploy in Production
The POC-to-Production Gap: A Persistent Challenge in Applied ML As data scientists, we’ve all encountered the frustrating reality of “pilot purgatory”—where promising proof-of-concept (POC) models deliver impressive offline performance but never make it to production. Industry reports highlight the scale of this issue: estimates suggest that 70-80% of ML projects fail to reach production deployment,…