AI Chatbot for SMB Application

Many small businesses are eager to harness the power of AI, but the path from a simple idea to a reliable, production-grade application is often filled with unexpected challenges. An AI chatbot that works perfectly on a developer's laptop can easily fail in a real-world cloud environment.

I recently completed a project to build a production-ready Conversational AI (RAG) Chatbot, and the journey taught me that success isn't just about the AI model—it's about mastering the architecture that supports it.

Moving from a prototype to production is a tale of three critical domains: Robust Deployment, Code Resilience, and Interactive User Experience. It requires moving beyond simple scripts to containerized applications, writing defensive code that anticipates failure, and designing a user interface that is both intuitive and reliable.

I’ve distilled the key architectural decisions, deployment strategies, and solutions to the inevitable roadblocks into the interactive presentation below. I hope this visual summary of my learnings is useful for anyone else embarking on a similar journey.