Push back on scope creep in week 5 of an AI pilot

You are running an 8-week pilot at Meridian Home Finance (fictional), a housing finance company in Mumbai. The pilot is a document-checklist assistant: loan officers upload a customer's documents and the assistant tells them which are missing, expired or inconsistent (for example, name mismatch between PAN and salary slip).

Committed scope, signed off in week 0:

• English UI for 40 loan officers in 3 branches
• Success metric: cut average file-completion time from 6 days to 3 days
• Demo to the MD at the end of week 8

It is now the end of week 5. Results are on track: file-completion time in the pilot branches is down to 3.8 days. Your team is 3 engineers.

Sandeep Kulkarni, Business Head for Retail Lending, emails you:

> "Great progress. For the MD demo I want two more things: (1) customers should be able to talk to it in Marathi and Hindi on the phone to find out what's missing, and (2) it should push the checklist straight into our loan origination system so officers don't copy-paste. The MD will love it. Can your team do both by week 8?"

You estimate voice in two languages is 5-6 weeks of work including testing and the telephony vendor; the loan origination system (LOS) integration is about 2 weeks if their IT team gives API access promptly.

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