A demo is 10% of the work. A 90-day playbook for taking an AI prototype to a reliable, monitored production system your team can actually own.
The 90% after the demo
Impressive prototypes hide the hard parts: data pipelines, evals, monitoring, error handling and the integrations that make a model useful inside real workflows.
Weeks 1–4: harden the foundation
Lock the use case and success metric, build the eval set, and stand up the data and retrieval plumbing. Replace the demo's happy-path shortcuts with real error handling.
Weeks 5–8: integrate and instrument
Wire the system into the tools people actually use, add guardrails and human-in-the-loop where the stakes are high, and ship logging and dashboards so you can see behavior in the wild.
Weeks 9–12: pilot, measure, hand off
Roll out to a controlled group, watch the metrics, fix the long tail, and transfer ownership with documentation and runbooks. Production isn't a launch date — it's a system someone can run.