The gap between "works in a demo" and "works in production" is large for AI integrations. The patterns that produce reliable AI-integrated products are not the same as the patterns that produce impressive demos. This guide covers what is production-ready, what is not, and what to build first.
Text generation and summarization: reliable across all major providers for well-defined tasks with good prompts. Classification and extraction: reliable when the categories and extraction targets are well-defined and the input data is clean. RAG (retrieval-augmented generation): reliable when the retrieval system is well-tuned and the documents are high-quality. Agentic workflows with human checkpoints: reliable when humans are in the loop for consequential decisions. Code generation assistance: reliable for code completion and generation, not reliable for unsupervised code deployment.
Fully autonomous agents making consequential decisions without human review. Real-time voice synthesis in customer-facing contexts where errors are costly. AI-generated output in regulated domains without human expert review. Any task where the cost of an error is high and errors happen at a rate of more than 1 in 100 outputs.
The thing that separates production AI integrations from demos is evaluation. You need to know what "working" means — specific, measurable criteria — and you need to measure it continuously in production. Without evaluation, you discover problems through user complaints rather than monitoring.
Fallback to human: when confidence is below a threshold, route to human review rather than delivering a low-confidence AI output. Async for non-real-time tasks: most AI tasks do not need to be synchronous. Async pipelines are more reliable and easier to monitor than synchronous API calls in the request path. Caching for repeated queries: if the same query will be asked frequently, cache the response rather than calling the API each time.
Axented builds production AI integrations for product companies — from architecture to evaluation pipelines. → axented.com/ai-solutions
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