AI Pilot Acceptance Testing: A 12-Case Contract Card for Swiss SMEs

Decision in one sentence: hire an AI consultant for a bounded pilot only when the supplier can turn one named business task into a baseline, a testable acceptance rule, a safe data path, a staffed operating handover, and a priced stop/continue decision; otherwise buy discovery or do the process work first.

If you are comparing providers in Ticino, begin with the local context in IAPME Suisse’s guide to AI consultants in Lugano and Ticino . That guide already covers multilingual work, local constraints, human review, and questions to ask. This article adds a buyer-side artifact: a proposal scorecard and twelve synthetic acceptance cases that make the pilot contract testable before you sign. The aim is not to prove that AI is always the answer.…