Why Most AI Pilots Never Make It to Production
By Alton Nguyen
Every leadership team I've sat with in the last two years has run at least one AI pilot. Almost none of them have scaled it.
The pattern is always the same. Someone in IT or innovation runs a proof-of-concept. It works in a demo. It gets a slide in the quarterly review. And then it quietly disappears, because nobody actually owns the decision to put it into production — and nobody budgeted for what happens after the demo.
Having spent 15+ years inside multinational commercial teams — managing portfolios, sitting in management team meetings, being accountable for a plan whether or not the tools behind it worked — I've noticed the pilots that survive have one thing in common: someone with P&L accountability was involved from day one, not brought in after the "innovation team" finished experimenting.
AI adoption fails for the same reason most transformation initiatives fail: it's treated as a technology project instead of a commercial one. A dashboard nobody uses in a real decision meeting isn't a failed technology — it's a failed process design.
If you're evaluating AI for your organization, the question isn't "does this technology work?" It's "who is accountable for using this in an actual decision next quarter, and what happens to their targets if they don't?" If you can't answer that, you have a pilot, not a plan.
What Running Someone Else's P&L Taught Me That No MBA Does
By Alton Nguyen
I founded my first company — Brand Here — in 2015. Five years later, I stepped away from it to go in-house at a multinational pharmaceutical company, managing brands and portfolios I hadn't built myself.
I expected the corporate role to feel smaller. It didn't. It taught me something the agency years hadn't: what it feels like to be accountable for a number you didn't set yourself, inside a system with compliance, regional stakeholders, and a management team watching the same plan you are.
As a founder, if a campaign underperforms, you absorb it and adjust. Inside a multinational, underperformance is a conversation with Regional Leadership, Medical Affairs, and Finance — all at once, all with different definitions of what "on track" means. You learn to build a plan that survives that scrutiny, not just one that sounds good in a pitch.
That's a different skill from founding a company, and it's one most consultants — and most AI vendors — never develop, because they've never had to defend a plan to people who didn't choose it.
I don't think either experience alone is enough. The agency years taught me how to build something from nothing. The corporate years taught me how to make something survive contact with a large organization's immune system. Brand Here, this time, is built on both.
The PR Industry Is Shrinking. Here's What Founders Should Do Instead.
By Alton Nguyen
When I founded Brand Here in 2015, traditional PR — press conferences, media relations, journalist relationships — was a core, defensible service. Vietnamese media has consolidated significantly since then, and with it, some of what used to be the industry's bread and butter.
That's not a reason to panic. It's a reason to be precise about what actually still works.
What hasn't gone away is the underlying need: getting the right message in front of the right decision-makers, credibly. What's changed is the channel and the tools. A founder today has more direct ways to reach an audience than a press conference ever offered — but also far more noise to cut through, which is exactly where AI-assisted content, targeting, and analysis earn their place, if used with judgment rather than as a shortcut around having something real to say.
My advice to founders navigating this shift: don't mourn the old channel, and don't chase every new tool either. Get precise about who actually needs to hear from you, and build the shortest credible path to them. The tool matters far less than the discipline of knowing exactly who you're trying to reach and why they should care.