
Over the past months, I attended more than 10 AI conferences, including PAKcon, the AIAI Summit, the AI & Data Summit, the Trustworthy AI Forum, and AICon. Engaging with AI engineers from large and medium-sized companies, as well as consultants specializing in generative AI (Gen AI), provided valuable insights into the current challenges of moving Large Language Model (LLM) applications from proof of concept (PoC) to production. This post synthesizes those insights and introduces a framework for understanding the key obstacles organizations face.