The gap between a working notebook and a production AI system is larger than most teams expect. It is not just about deployment — it is about guardrails, validation, concurrent processing, and designing for failure.
At 1POINT1, building an NL-to-SQL platform taught me that schema-aware guardrails matter more than model selection. Non-technical users do not need the smartest model — they need a system that never returns a query that corrupts data.