Bound the work
Name one workflow, the production audience, failure categories and the decision the pilot will inform. Exclude adjacent features that would blur the result. State which data, reviewers and infrastructure the buyer must provide. Start the delivery clock only when the agreed dependencies are available.
Keep the comparator credible
Use a dated, reasonably optimised API alternative and document what prompting, retrieval, caching and routing tests were attempted. Both paths should receive the same task definition and scoring policy. The buyer should retain control of the protected evaluation and approve any changes to its composition.
Approve gates and stop conditions
Write quality, latency, deployment, cost and budget requirements as proposed or approved, never interchangeably. Agree who can stop the pilot and what happens if a gate is missed. A useful pilot can conclude that the API is adequate, that data remediation comes first or that development should not proceed.
Specify a usable handover
Require the configuration, evidence register, failure analysis, source and split manifests, cost assumptions and agreed portable artefacts. Assign maintenance and incident responsibilities before production. The output should let another qualified team reproduce the comparison, understand what remains untested and operate or exit the chosen approach.
Bring to the decision review
A useful kickoff ends with a named person approving each gate and a clear definition of a complete handover. Record proposed thresholds separately from approved ones. Identify what happens when data arrives late, labels change or the supplier finds the task unsuitable. These conditions belong in the scope discussion, so that a valid stop decision is treated as an informative pilot outcome rather than an unexplained delivery failure.
Sources & editorial record
This is Frontier Development’s decision framework. The references below support the general technical concepts; the worked scenarios and procurement questions are our analysis.
References accessed 16 October 2026. No current price, product availability or legal clearance is asserted. Published study findings are attributed above; this guide reports no Frontier Development experiment. Read the comparison method.
Review history and research boundary
Edition 1.1 · 16 October 2026: added claim-level attribution, explicit evidence boundaries and links to the flagship synthesis. Published by Frontier Development. No named external technical reviewer is recorded. This guide provides a decision framework; it is not a Frontier Development experimental result.
Read the primary-study synthesis →Open the pilot tool
Explore a complete synthetic example before using your own inputs.