Why most automation pilots die in month two

Month one is easy. Someone builds the workflow, runs it on clean test data, and it works beautifully in the demo. Month two is when real data shows up: the malformed lead, the duplicate customer record, the field that's sometimes blank and sometimes has three commas in it.

The pilot dies not because the automation was wrong, but because nobody built an exception path. A workflow with no way to handle the weird 8% of cases either silently mishandles them or hard-stops, and either one erodes trust within a week.

The fix is unglamorous: budget a third of the build time for exception handling before you ever demo the happy path. A Slack alert on failure, a manual-review queue, a log anyone can read without opening the automation tool itself.

The pilots that survive month two are the boring ones: not because the automation is simpler, but because someone thought about what happens when it's wrong before anyone asked.