We are excited to announce that the full recording of the Beetroot online discussion, AI Agents in the Real World: From Prototypes to Production, featuring smartR AI’s Founder and CEO, Oliver King-Smith, is now available!
On December 2nd, Oliver joined a distinguished panel of tech leaders and AI product managers to move past the industry "hype" and focus on the practical realities of deploying AI agents that generate real business impact.
🔑 Key Takeaways from the Discussion
The expert panel offered crucial insights for any organization looking to move their AI projects from small-scale prototypes to secure, scalable production systems. Oliver King-Smith provided strong, specific guidance on the pitfalls and necessary foundations for success:
- The Validation Gap: Oliver stressed that many teams rush into building without "very rigorously defining their use case" or establishing a solid validation set—the critical benchmarks required to measure an agent’s real-world performance.
- Focus on Narrow Use Cases: Agentic AI currently works best when making "very limited decisions." Organizations should focus on narrow, specific use cases where the system can excel, rather than trying to apply broad, high-level automation.
- Context Engineering over Prompt Engineering: The panel highlighted that over-investing in the agent's central logic (prompts) and under-investing in the data infrastructure is a common failure point. Agentic systems become exponentially more powerful when they have structured, curated access to data.
- Start Internally: For companies starting out, Oliver cautioned that it is "better to produce an internal tool, as opposed to an external-facing tool," as internal applications allow for controlled user behavior and easier, safer testing.
- Testing is Different: Unlike traditional software, where the goal is a 100% "green" test suite, the panel noted that with unpredictable AI outputs, a "healthy test suite is 70% green," requiring a radically different approach to Quality Assurance.
🔗 Watch the Full Panel Discussion
If you are currently wrestling with the challenges of scaling AI, governance, security, or orchestration in your agentic projects, this session provides a crucial, behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to succeed in 2026.
Watch the full recording here: https://www.youtube.com/live/tErnwVwOmLg