Ironclad

Real ROI: Lessons from Enterprises that have already succeeded with LLMs at Scale: Raza Habib

Dec 31, 2024 · 20:01

Raza Habib, CEO of Humanloop, shares lessons from enterprises like Duolingo, Filevine, and Ironclad that have achieved real ROI with LLMs at scale. He argues that success hinges on centering domain experts (e.g., Duolingo's linguists do all prompt engineering), needing less ML expertise than expected, and breaking down evaluation into small, testable components rather than chasing a single metric. Habib emphasizes collecting end-user feedback (acceptance rates, edits, thumbs up/down) and building tooling for logging, regression testing, and team collaboration. Filevine doubled revenue by launching six LLM-powered products; Ironclad's open-source Rivet logging tool enabled agents to auto-negotiate 50% of contracts. The talk covers how to optimize the four-component chain (base model, prompt, data selection, function calling) and why simpler systems will win as models improve.

The AI Pivot: With Chris White of Prefect & Bryan Bischof of Hex

Nov 7, 2023 · 35:16

Chris White (CTO of Prefect) and Bryan Bischof (Head of AI at Hex) detail how their non-AI startups successfully pivoted to integrate AI, arguing that ruthless prioritization and deep product integration are key. White explains Prefect built the open-source Marvin project to learn from LLM experimenters, while adding AI features like error summaries to its core orchestration product, but had to restrain over-enthusiasm from engineers. Bischof describes Hex's Magic feature as an augmentation, not a separate product, and explains they built their own evaluation system but chose not to build a vector database, and killed a promising feature called Crystal Ball to avoid splitting the product experience. They both emphasize machine-to-machine interfaces and typed outputs, and caution that the work is often tedious data engineering. Their hot takes: White says stop building chat interfaces, AI is a tool; Bischof warns that the journey is boring but worth it.