We had a great webinar this past week with Mike Cizmar and Judah Phillips. One topic stood out: how to plan for the jump from POC to production.
It's the question nobody asks until after the demo lands. And by then, it's usually too late.
A simple demo isn't always simple to scale
Take a familiar example. Many AI products today offer chatbots that answer questions "from a PDF." The demo looks great: drop in a document, ask a question, watch the LLM respond. Tidy.
Now expand the scope. You want the bot to answer questions about more than a single PDF. You want it to draw on your dynamically-generated website - the one with navigation, sidebars, and advertising links the LLM has to ignore. You want it to pull from internal sources too.
Suddenly the workflow looks very different. You're collecting information from multiple locations, reformatting it into something the LLM can ingest, uploading new PDFs every time something changes, and managing the whole curation pipeline yourself. The time the bot was supposed to save you is now spent feeding it.
This is the moment most pilots quietly die. The demo worked. The production version is a second job.
How SWIRL solves this
A financial think tank recently replaced their PDF-trained chatbot with SWIRL. Instead of generating a new PDF every time they wanted a bot to answer questions about a new topic, the SWIRL AI Co-Pilot answers questions by searching relevant internal sources at query time - SharePoint sites, Box collections, password-protected websites - and generates an answer using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
No PDF preprocessing. No upload step. No curation pipeline.
And no staleness. When the underlying system of record is updated, the next response from the LLM reflects the change. There's no index to rebuild, no document to re-upload.
Try it
You can run the SWIRL Community Edition locally in five minutes with Docker - see the quick-start instructions on GitHub. Or, if you'd rather skip ahead, book a demo and we'll walk you through what production looks like with SWIRL underneath.