"The happy path is the easy part: designing AI features for the inputs you didn't expect"
Your AI feature works on the inputs you chose. Production sends the ones you didn't: sideways scans, empty fields, German invoices and documents that talk back to the model. Handling those is not polish — it is most of the feature.
Every AI feature I have been asked to rescue has had the same origin story. It worked well on the inputs the team built it with — clean PDFs, tidy emails, sensible questions in English — and then it met real users. Real users upload photographs of documents taken at an angle in bad light. They paste half an email thread into a field meant for a company name. They submit forms with every optional field blank and the mandatory one containing "asdf". None of this is malice. It is simply what input looks like once you stop choosing it yourself.
Have an AI feature stuck between demo and production?
The gap — reliability, evals, cost control, the plumbing that keeps it running unattended — is exactly the work I do. If that sounds familiar, a short conversation is usually enough to point you the right way.
Book a free consultation