How to prune your AI pilot portfolio before Q3 board reviews
Series C boards are no longer asking how many AI pilots are running. They are asking which ones to kill before Q3, and most teams do not have a defensible answer yet. Here is the five-step pruning protocol.
TLDR Series C boards entering Q3 are no longer asking how many AI pilots a company is running. They are asking which ones should be killed, and most teams do not have a portfolio-level inventory yet. The five-step pruning protocol below runs in roughly four weeks and produces the slide a Q3 board most wants to see. Three Series C CEOs sent me their AI portfolio review decks last week. Two of them had the same blank slide in slot four: “AI Initiatives We Are Sunsetting.” Neither had filled it in. That blank slide is the Q3 board review problem. Boards are no longer asking how many AI pilots a company is running. They are asking which ones are still alive in twelve months, and which ones should be killed before the burn keeps going. A Gartner study of 782 infrastructure and operations leaders, reported by The Register on April 7, found that only 28 percent of enterprise AI projects fully succeed and deliver ROI. One in five fail outright. The remaining slice, the largest one, is the dangerous slice: alive enough to keep getting funded, dead enough that nobody can point to a clean win. That is the slice your board is now pointing at. 11-25% of enterprise AI pilots reach sustained production (FifthRow, April 28, 2026) What Series C teams actually built The shape of a Series C AI portfolio in April 2026 is reasonably consistent. Eight to fifteen active initiatives. Most launched between the second half of 2024 and Q1 2026. Funded through a mix of departmental budgets, central IT, and one or two CEO-level priority bets. Few of them ever appeared on a single page together until a board member asked. The reason that page never existed is structural. ProcureAbility’s 2026 CPO-CIO Report, released April 29, found that while 96 percent of procurement and IT teams collaborate to some degree, 54 percent of them do not collaborate at all on AI governance. Initiatives got funded one P&L at a time. Procurement did not see them. Finance saw them as line items, not as a portfolio