AI: From Scratch to Scale
The unglamorous path from a first AI prototype to a scaled, costed, governed system — an Engatica interview briefing.
A flagship theme from the original Engatica video library, relaunched as a written briefing while our new interview series records its first season.
The briefing
Prototypes are cheap; scale is an operations problem. The teams that make the jump share a sequence: one narrow use case with a measurable baseline; an evaluation set built before the second use case is allowed; a gateway so models can be swapped without rewrites; and cost accounting per task from day one, because the bill is the first thing scale changes. The final stage — governance, audit trails, incident drills — is where most programmes discover they built a demo organisation around a production system.
Questions we ask every guest on this theme
- What broke first when usage grew 10x?
- Which metric told you the prototype was actually good?
- What would you refuse to rebuild the same way?
Companion reading: LLMOps in 2027.