Prototype to Production: Overcoming AI System Challenges

Speed to prototype was never the only bottleneck. Anyone who's run a hackathon knows it. Twenty-four hours to a working demo, and then months to ship — if it shipped at all. The prototype was never the only hard part. Ownership, observability, cost at scale, team capability to maintain what got built — that's where things stalled. AI compresses the prototype phase by orders of magnitude. The rest of the bottlenecks are still there. You just arrive at them faster now, and more often. The partners worth working with are the ones who've solved the hard part, not just the fast part. #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #AWSPartner #EnterpriseAI #CommerceArchitects

This is a deja vu moment: new tool/process comes along speeding up initial development. Everyone gets excited, demos delight, leadership makes grand plans for a massive roadmap. And then the same bottlenecks show up. AI is a bigger accelerator than the previous leaps, but the same pattern is here. Shipping high-value, scalable solutions to production has been in our DNA from the start. That focus is more critical than ever right now.

I broke my own rule at my first AI hackathon. I tell businesses all the time: spend more time understanding the problem before you jump to solutions. I did not do that before the hackathon. Our team had six hours to trace federal housing funding through to actual spending in Alberta. We had AI tools, a scrappy tech stack, and a lot of confidence. What we didn't have was enough time upfront to understand what we were actually measuring. Defining 'housing starts' alone took longer than expected. Then came the timing issues — an announcement is not an approval, an approval is not a contract, a contract is not a shovel in the ground. The lag can be 1–3 years. Our results weren't accurate. And that taught me more than accurate results would have. The biggest takeaway? AI is impressive at processing large volumes of information. But knowing which questions to ask, how to define a problem, and how to make sense of what comes back. This is still deeply human work. I wrote about the full experience (what we tried, what broke, and what I'd do differently) in my new Substack, Nil's News. https://lnkd.in/eqS6gPMi #AI #HumanLayer #PublicPolicy #HousingPolicy #Hackathon #DeeperClarity

🚀 Runners-Up at LogAI Hackathon A bit late posting this — but this was worth sharing. Our team OAM Explorers finished as Runner-Up at the LogAI Hackathon, a Nokia-wide hackathon. 🎉 💡 What we worked on We explored how systems can move beyond reactive operations and become more aware, adaptive, and autonomous — detecting issues, understanding them, and closing the loop with minimal human effort. 🤖 What we built An AI-driven approach that pushes toward self-detect → self-diagnose → self-heal systems. Less firefighting, more intelligent systems that can reason and verify outcomes. 🧠 What stood out during the journey - Getting the data right was harder (and more important) than the modeling - Applying AI in deterministic environments forces you to think deeply about validation - Tooling and iteration speed make a big difference when experimenting - Most importantly — picking the right problem matters more than over-engineering the solution 📈 Why this matters It’s a small but meaningful step toward building systems that are not just automated, but intelligent by design. It was a great experience collaborating with Manohar SL and Bhadrinath Eruventee - a team that combined deep expertise with a strong execution mindset. Also thankful for the continued support and encouragement from the Nokia NSP and Innovation board management throughout. Always up for conversations around building practical, high-impact AI systems. #AI #GenAI #Hackathon #Innovation #MLOps

In the realm of "Network Automation", we stand in front of an amazing Golden Window of Opportunity to pivot the domain towards "Autonomous Networks Level-5 (AN-L5)", which indeed, is a perfect inflection point of the Design Principles of this ambitious journey, precisely complemented by the capabilities of Agentic AI. Truly, the domain can mature towards the stability of making the very experience of Network Automation to the natural experience of "Reading Morning NewsPaper", where-in the Network is now running in a fully Autonomous Mode and we only need to go through the summary of the same, on a daily basis, which by itself is a goal setting to the Agentic AI, which needs to be embedded into the very fabric of the "Network Automation + Agentic AI Transformative Architecture", at the scope of each DesignLayer/Module/Dev/Test/Discussion. Also, its important to pass on the Human Knowledge/Wisdom of the Domain, as a feed-back loop, after reading the "Morning NewsPaper", so that, this again, gets embedded into the very Design of the Core Agentic AI based Network Automation Architecture. So, it is so much important to get these discussions into the very culture of the Organizations/Teams/Individuals, and Hackathons prove to be a very important platform to set the Compass exactly in this direction, which enables one step at a time, in the right direction. So, extremely happy to have participated in one such event at Nokia, along with Wonderful Colleagues Bhadrinath Eruventee and Sorabh Ojha 😊 Also, Thanks Sorabh Ojha for posting this, let's take the spirit of Innovation forward and Enjoy the Journey towards AN-L5 👍

Didn’t get selected for the Claude Opus hackathon. That’s fine. I’m not building demos. I’m building something that has to work in the real world. Where: → decisions cost money → mistakes create disputes → “almost correct” is still wrong AI is powerful. But without real-world constraints, it’s easy to build things that look good and break fast. I’ll keep building. Curious: How many of the things we build with AI today would actually survive real-world pressure? Cerebral Valley

Be10x Just wrapped up my submission for the Be10x AI Generalist Hackathon! 🎯 I built a bulk mail communication that helps professionals a standard communication to employees, shareholders, ankers, statutory authorities can be personalized and sent. Powered by mailmeteor. Biggest challenge: couldn’t be directly opened from mailmeteor gave and error of "oauth_credentials_required". Biggest learning This was resolved by integrating it through the Google Sheets extension, which ensured smooth functionality. Grateful to @Be10X for the push. #AI #Hackathon #Be10X

Last week at Big Berlin Hack by {Tech: Europe}, Aditya Ladawa and I worked on something that sits between real estate, context engineering, and agentic AI. Our project, Buena Context Engine, turns scattered property-management data into a structured “property brain.” Instead of letting one AI assistant randomly search through files, we designed an agentic workflow where multiple agents work behind the scenes: one agent understands and normalizes documents, another extracts property-related facts, another connects entities like buildings, units, tenants, owners, invoices, and communications, while another helps the user interact through chat and corrections. The goal was simple: make AI answers more reliable by grounding them in sources, context, entity relationships, and human-approved updates. This video shows how the system moves from raw property data to a connected knowledge graph, then into a chat interface where the agent can explain what it knows, what is missing, and where the information comes from. A great hackathon experience, and a strong reminder that the future of AI is not just about better prompts, it is about building better context around the agent. GitHub repo: https://lnkd.in/e7xDQNuv #BigBerlinHack #AgenticAI #ContextEngineering #Hackathon #RealEstateTech

The AI Agent Olympics Hackathon from lablab.ai is officially underway at Milan AI Week 🇮🇹 Builders around the world are deploying autonomous AI agents, multi-agent systems, and enterprise AI applications with real-world impact — all powered by Vultr infrastructure. Follow the action: https://lnkd.in/dSWsXJR5

Since the birth of Lovable, I always wanted to bring their game-changing technology to our community in Cluj. Today, I’m beyond excited to announce that this is finally happening. Lovable is officially joining forces with Cluj Hackathon 2026! 🚀 As a founder, my goal has always been to give our builders access to the absolute best tools in the world. By welcoming the fastest-growing AI product-building platform into our ecosystem, we are doing exactly that. The "old way" of building products is shifting. With Lovable, the builders at #ClujHackathon will be able to create faster, smarter, and bolder by turning ambitious ideas into functional products in record time. A huge thank you to the team at Lovable and Sophia Nabil Gustafsson for believing in our vision and supporting the next generation of European builders. PS: We have a special prize waiting down the line... and trust me, you don’t want to miss it. 😉 See you at the starting line! #ClujHackathon #LovableAI #DigitalRomania #DigitalTransformation #AI #Builders #TechRomania #ClujNapoca