The equipment finance industry, surveying its AI adoption, has diagnosed itself with a technology problem: too many pilots, too few production deployments, a landscape of proofs-of-concept that proved concepts and then expired. The diagnosis flatters the industry, because it locates the failure in the machines. The machines are, in most of the stalled cases, fine. What the pilots lacked was something the industry supposedly does better than anyone: underwriting. A defined expectation of performance, stated before commitment. Measurement of actuals against that expectation. Monitoring for drift. An escalation path for exceptions. And a named owner with authority to extend, restructure, or kill. Every credit the industry books gets this treatment. Almost no AI deployment does — and the difference explains pilot purgatory more completely than any vendor’s shortcomings.
The anatomy of purgatory
Examine a stalled initiative and the underwriting gaps are immediate. There was no origination memo: the pilot launched against a vibe — “explore document automation” — rather than a stated expectation with numbers attached, so no result could ever constitute success or failure; the pilot could only ever be interesting. There was no covenant package: nobody defined the thresholds — accuracy floors, exception-rate ceilings, cycle-time targets — whose breach would trigger review, so degradation and disappointment accumulated as anecdote rather than event. There was no seasoning discipline: the evaluation window ended before the tool met its hard cases, the operational equivalent of judging a vintage at three months. And above all, there was no owner in the credit sense — someone whose name attaches to the outcome, with authority over the kill decision. Pilots in most institutions are owned the way orphan accounts are owned: nominally, collectively, and not at all. The result is the portfolio every workout officer recognizes — exposures nobody will write off because nobody wants to have been wrong, consuming attention and budget in a purgatory that is neither performing nor resolved. The industry would never run a book this way. It runs its technology this way as a matter of course.
