A team cut their AI inference bill by more than half. Three months later, customer satisfaction was dropping and the cost savings were tied to the quality loss.
Most RAG systems are optimized for answer quality, not cost—and that blind spot gets expensive fast. In this article, I break down a production-ready cost control layer combining semantic caching, query routing, token budgeting, and circuit breaking, achieving an 85% reduction in LLM costs without sacrificing answer quality.
Using mathematical optimization to solve a pickup-and-delivery problem with time windows. The post “Los Movimientos”: The Routing Problem That Nearly Broke My Spirit appeared first on Towards Data Science .
An AI agent passed every metric in the eval harness I published, then the CFO killed it — its successful resolutions cost more than the humans it replaced. The one metric that predicts whether an agent survives production, and how to measure it without a rebuild.
You "vibe coded" the import. Understand Adam's optimization dynamics, why it fails spectacularly, and how to fix it.
arXiv:2607. 25068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Routing decisions between a cheap heuristic and an expensive large language model (LLM) are typically framed as a difficulty problem: send the hard cases to the expensive path.
How to decide when an AI agent should act on its own by using cost asymmetry instead of a fixed confidence cutoff The post The Threshold Is a Price, Not a Percentage appeared first on Towards Data Science .
For nearly a decade, this part of neural networks barely changed. DeepSeek is trying to reinvent it.
arXiv:2606. 17519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Production LLM assistants route user requests to growing libraries of specialized tools, but how does routing accuracy degrade as the catalog scales?
What actually makes a Forward Deployed Engineer, told through one supply chain project. The post The AI Was the Easy Part: What Is a Forward-Deployed Engineer in a Supply Chain?
The hidden cost of asynchronous systems, how tiny CPU tasks quietly became our biggest bottleneck while scaling hundreds of LLM agents. The post Why Adding More AI Agents Made Our System Slower appeared first on Towards Data Science .
Map AI value, design workflows, redefine talent, upgrade the executive team, and measure the business impact. The post Redesign Work Before You Add More AI Agents appeared first on Towards Data Science .
AI does not decide who gets fired. Companies do.