Beyond the Magic. From the “wow” demo to production: designing sustainable, controllable, and measurable AI agents

After the initial “wow” effect of demos, AI agents face their toughest challenge: production.

Autonomy, reasoning, and tool calling promise powerful applications, but without proper control they can lead to high costs, latency, contextual noise, and unpredictable outcomes.

This talk explores what happens when an agent moves from prototype to a real operational system.

The journey starts from a concrete use case, highlighting the main bottlenecks: context overload, tool bloat, payload management, and web search.

It also examines strategies to reduce context without sacrificing quality, guide tool usage effectively, and introduce budgeting logic.

The focus is on designing lighter, more targeted, and more sustainable functions.

The goal is not to limit the agent’s intelligence, but to provide it with a more controllable architecture.

The session will also cover monitoring, automated quality controls, and future scenarios ranging from SLM + LLM systems to code execution.

Because a sustainable AI agent is not improvised — it is built through deliberate design choices.