The Honesty Gap Entering Planning Season
Kelly Lewis and Tiffany Jones put a number on something most RevOps leaders already sense but haven't said out loud: the AI activity reported up to boards and the AI actually running in production are different things. Different enough to matter. In episode 125 of RevOps Lab, they frame this as a board-level honesty gap — and it's colliding with Q4 planning right now.
Annual plans were built on assumptions about AI agents coaching reps, automating pipeline review, accelerating forecasting. The reality: most of those initiatives are still in pilot, still dependent on a champion holding them together, still not generating the efficiency assumptions baked into headcount models. Consumption pricing compounds this. Annual contracts written before usage-based AI tooling existed don't bend gracefully when actual consumption diverges from projections.
The Haves and Have-Nots Split Is Accelerating
The episode identifies a widening divide between organizations that have moved AI from pilot to production and those still cycling through proofs of concept. This isn't primarily a technology gap. It's an operational discipline gap. Companies on the wrong side of it are entering 2027 planning with two compounding problems: budgets built on capability assumptions that never shipped, and no reliable data on what their AI investments have actually produced.
The specific risk: when planning sessions open this quarter, those fictional baselines become next year's targets. Headcount decisions, quota models, and technology spend all inherit the fiction.
The Audit You Should Run Before Planning Locks
Before your 2027 scope gets committed, do one thing: list every AI initiative that appears in your current plan or board reporting and mark each one as either in production (used by real users, generating real output, measurable) or in pilot (still being tested, still dependent on manual support, not yet scaled).
The ratio between those two columns is your actual budget risk number. Any initiative still in pilot that has headcount or efficiency savings attributed to it in your 2027 model is a liability, not an asset.
If the audit surfaces more pilots than production deployments, the immediate fix isn't to accelerate all of them. It's to decide which two or three are worth the operational investment to actually finish — and to reforecast the rest honestly before those assumptions get locked into annual targets that will be impossible to hit.