Frameworks · AI Don't Fix Stupidity

Customer Zero

Before an AI capability faces a customer, it faces your own people.

Stages

  1. Internal pilot
  2. Customer Zero
  3. Limited rollout
  4. Full production

Use your own organisation as the proving ground: failure is cheap, feedback is honest, "We run this ourselves" earns credibility, and the unglamorous operational problems get solved first. The book warns that internal deployment can still do harm to employees. The four-stage list below follows the Deployment Toolkit, which separates an internal pilot from Customer Zero, a lead customer who agrees to co-create. The Architecture Toolkit uses Customer Zero for the first internal user instead. The passages use the name differently; both require staged testing before wider rollout.