From Demo to Production:Optimizing AI Agents
💡 From Slow to Sub-30: Optimizing AI Agents for Real-World Use
Welcome to another edition of Workshop Wednesday! In this session, we are joined by Vaishnavi Shantharam, an IT Business Analyst and data strategist who specializes in turning raw data into fast, confident decisions.
AI agents are easy to prototype but incredibly hard to optimize for real-world trust and daily use. Moving past the "demo" phase requires a shift from technical theory to practical optimization.
In this workshop, Vaishnavi takes us behind the scenes of a real production use case: a Snowflake Cortex Agent built to handle 60,000+ monthly support cases. She breaks down the exact strategies used to slash response times from 55 seconds to sub-30 seconds, and cut user friction in half. No coding experience is required—these optimization patterns apply to anyone building, managing, or evaluating AI-powered chatbots, dashboards, and tools.
🔍 What You’ll Learn In This Workshop:
The Bottleneck Blueprint: A repeatable framework to diagnose where an AI system is actually lagging, eliminating the guesswork.
Prompts as Logic: Why custom instructions should be treated as rigorous business decision logic, not just personality or tone-setting.
User-Centered Metrics: Why measuring "messages-per-insight" matters significantly more than raw query latency when evaluating an AI tool's success.
Bridge the Gap: The core differences that separate a flashy prototype from a reliable tool that users trust every single day.
👤 About the Speaker: Vaishnavi Shantharam is an IT Business Analyst with a Master’s in Business Analytics and nearly 3 years of experience building data pipelines, dashboards, and AI agents to support business decision-making at a leading medical device company. Notably, she engineered a production Snowflake Cortex Agent that successfully slashed response times from 55 seconds to under 30 seconds—an achievement documented in Snowflake's own Builders Blog. Vaishnavi is also an active member of her company's Women in AI group and is passionate about driving actionable analytics over standard reporting.
🔗 Connect with Vaishnavi: LinkedIn: vaishnavi-shantharam
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