MIT NANDA’s 2025 report (PDF) says most GenAI pilots miss for business reasons, not technical ones. The fastest paybacks show up in the back office, where outcomes are clear, data stays in your tenant, and value is easy to measure.

Why pilots miss the mark

Most teams start with a great demo and a small pilot. Then progress slows. The model is rarely the problem. The way we pick, run, and measure the work is. Ideas arrive ad hoc. Ownership is muddy. Success criteria are vague, so even “wins” do not move forward. The fix is simple to say and hard to skip: start where the work is owned, the outcome is measurable, and the path to production is short. That is usually the back office.

Why back office wins first

Back office work is where you can prove impact quickly. Cycle time, first-pass yield, and hours saved are easy to track. These processes sit close to core systems, which makes it straightforward to deploy inside your tenant, use your access controls, and keep a clean audit trail. You also see real dollars when you cut rework, reduce handoffs, or bring tasks back from outside vendors. Customer-facing use cases matter, but they often have more stakeholders and more risk. Starting behind the scenes builds momentum and credibility.

What “back office first” looks like

Focus on high-volume work with rules and judgment, especially where handoffs cause delays. Think claims intake, AP and AR, order changes, contract review, onboarding, and policy lookups across large document sets. Use document intelligence and retrieval-augmented search to read emails and PDFs. Add business rules and confidence thresholds so low-confidence items go to people. Let digital workers handle the clicks and updates across your apps and the web. Keep data in place. Deploy inside your tenant and log every action.

How to run it so it sticks

Line up the business before you build. Use a simple intake across teams and one scorecard to rank ideas by value, time to live, data readiness, and a named owner. Pick two success measures up front and publish one dashboard leaders will actually read. Expand across business units on purpose, not by accident. Reuse what works, from intake to training to how handoffs change. That is how you avoid a pile of one-off solutions.

Why IAaaS accelerates results

You can do this in-house and some teams do. Most do not have the time. With Intelligent Automation as a Service, Optezo designs and builds the automations, deploys inside your tenant, and runs them day to day with SLAs, monitoring, and updates. You focus on the business. We keep the digital workers productive. For more depth, see Hyperautomation 2025, Responsible Automation, and From 2 Bots to 20.

Bottom line

Most pilots fail for business reasons. If you want results this quarter, start in the back office, agree on the win, keep data in your tenant, and run with simple guardrails. That is how you move from pilots to production and show durable ROI.

Ready to put GenAI to work where it pays first? We will design it, deploy inside your tenant, and run it with IAaaS so your team can stay focused on the business.
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