Built the thing, validated the problem, now nobody wants to be the first to trial it - I will not promote

Grad civil engineer in Sydney, been building something on the side and I've hit a wall. Quick context on what it is: construction teams lose lessons between projects constantly. A job gets burned by something, learns it, and 18 months later a different team at the same company makes the identical mistake because nobody talks across projects. Every contractor has a "lessons learned register" and every one of them is a spreadsheet nobody opens. I've built a tool that captures lessons in about 30 seconds (voice or text, AI structures it) and surfaces them when someone hits a related problem, instead of waiting for them to go searching. The problem validation has been genuinely good. Posted about the problem on some construction subs and got 20+ practitioners agreeing, including a bloke with 25 years across tier 1s who said he's never seen a lessons system work anywhere. Had a few calls with directors and senior engineers. Everyone agrees the problem is real and expensive. Where I'm stuck: nobody wants to be the first to actually trial it. I've got a working prototype, I've offered it free, one director even volunteered to be a guinea pig unprompted. But there's a gap between "yeah that's a real problem" and "yes I'll run this on my team for a month." Everyone's busy, nobody wants to be first, and a grad with a side project is competing with their actual job for attention. So the questions: How did you get your first pilot or first customer over the line? Especially anyone selling into a conservative industry where nobody wants to go first.