How to Run a Generative AI Proof of Concept Your Committee Will Actually Trust
Vendor demos answer the vendor's question. A five-week proof of concept with a rubric agreed up front answers yours. Here is the method.
The demo is not the evidence
Most organizations choose an enterprise AI platform the way they choose a caterer. There are a few polished demonstrations, a pricing call, and a decision made largely on impressions. Six months later nobody can say whether the tool is doing the job, because nobody wrote down what the job was.
A proof of concept is meant to fix that, and it can, but only if it is designed as an evaluation rather than as a trial subscription with a deadline. The thing that separates the two is the rubric, and the discipline of agreeing on it before anyone touches the software.
Write the decision before you touch the software
A proof of concept exists to answer one question, and that question should be written down in a sentence the decision committee will recognize as its own. For a professional services firm it might read: should we adopt platform X for first-pass document review, and under what conditions?
Everything downstream depends on that sentence. If the question is vague, the findings will be vague, and the committee will do what committees do with vague findings, which is defer.
Build the weighted rubric with the committee, not for it
List the criteria that bear on the decision, then have the committee weight them before testing begins. For document work the list usually includes accuracy against the organization's own positions and precedents, consistency across document types, the reviewer effort needed to reach a usable draft, the fit with existing configuration, security and governance, and the confidence practitioners report after real use.
The weights are the committee's own judgment about what matters, recorded in advance. Locking them in before testing removes the single largest source of distrust in proof-of-concept results: the suspicion that the scoring was tuned, after the fact, to produce a preferred answer.
Configure the platform on your material, by hand
A platform evaluated on the vendor's sample documents tells you how the vendor's demonstration performs. To learn how the platform performs for you, configure it on your own document types, with your own playbooks and positions, and do that configuration yourselves or with someone independent of the vendor. The effort involved is itself a finding. How much expert time does it take to make the tool useful is a question the committee will want answered.
Test with practitioners, on a fixed schedule, against the rubric
Give the people who would actually use the tool a short set of realistic tasks and a copy of the rubric. Fix the testing window, because open-ended testing never ends. Collect the scores, and collect the written reasons behind them with equal care. A partner's note that a draft "missed the fallback position we always take" is worth more than any number out of five.
Expect the schedule to slip. Practitioners are busy and testing competes with billable work, so build a buffer into the five weeks and keep a running tally of who has completed which tasks.
Write for the committee meeting, not for the file
The findings document has one reader who matters: the person who will present it to the committee in ten minutes. It should open with the question from the first step, then give the answer in a single paragraph with its conditions attached. The scores against the weighted rubric follow, with the weights visible, then what practitioners said, quoted and attributed by role. It should state plainly what the proof of concept could not test, and it should close with the decision options, each carrying its cost and its tradeoff. The vendor comparison tables belong in an appendix. Nobody decides from an appendix.
What five weeks buys you
A weighted rubric, hands-on configuration, practitioner testing and a committee-ready document add up to a five-week engagement for a mid-sized organization. Set against a multi-year platform commitment and the change management that follows it, that is a modest investment.
The point is not to slow the decision down. It is to make the decision defensible, so that when someone asks a year from now why the firm chose what it chose, there is a document that answers.