How to take an AI agent from pilot to production
Short answer
A pilot proves the agent can do the task once; production proves it does the task every time, safely, at a known cost, inside your systems. The gap is integration, permissions, evaluation, and operations: the work forward deployed engineers do.
Why pilots stall
- The agent worked on demo data and fails on real records.
- There is no evaluation set, so nobody can say whether a change made it better or worse.
- Security will not grant access to real systems, because nobody has defined what the agent may touch.
- Nobody owns the agent after launch.
- Costs at real volume are unknown.
- Failures are not handled: there is no retry policy, no fallback, and no human handoff.
Production checklist
- An evaluation set built from real cases, with a pass threshold agreed before launch.
- Integrations through least-privilege service accounts, scoped to the tools the agent needs.
- Human approval for irreversible actions such as payments, deletions, and outbound messages.
- Logs and an audit trail of every run, tool call, and change.
- A staged rollout: shadow mode, then a small share of traffic, then everyone.
- An on-call owner, runbooks, and a kill switch.
- A cost budget per run and per month, with alerts.
How DailyMind helps
We work inside your environment as forward deployed engineers: build the evaluation set, wire the integrations with your security team, set up monitoring and rollout, and run the first weeks in production with you. Then we hand over runbooks and dashboards in your repositories.
Frequently asked questions
What is a forward deployed engineer?
An engineer who works inside a customer's environment to deploy, integrate, and adapt a system to that customer's data and processes, instead of building only from the vendor side.
How do we evaluate an agent before launch?
Collect real past cases with known correct outcomes, run the agent on them, and score the results. Re-run the same set on every prompt, model, or tool change.
Which actions should need human approval?
Anything irreversible or external: moving money, deleting data, sending messages to customers, and changing access rights. Relax the rule only with evidence from production.
Talk to us
Running agents or AI-built software in production? Tell us your setup and what worries you, and we will suggest where a readiness review should start.
Book a readiness review