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AI Integration in Practice: From Demo to Operable Workflows
RAG and agents are exciting — permissions, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop ops are where cost lives. A phased rollout framework from consulting work.
AI Integration in Practice
A successful PoC does not mean production readiness. Common blockers: data quality, untraceable hallucinations, scattered prompts, no offline eval.
Phased rollout
| Phase | Goal |
|---|---|
| 0 | Define task + success metrics (accuracy, latency, cost) |
| 1 | Single-path RAG + human review |
| 2 | Tool use / agents + permission gates |
| 3 | Monitoring, A/B, feedback loops |
Engineering focus
- Context engineering: chunking, metadata, versioning
- Permissions: tenant/role isolation for vector stores
- Observability: traces, citations, refusal policies