Field notes
Production AI patterns we ship every week. Stuck pilots, MCP hardening, eval suites, agent orchestration, cost control. Written by Alex Cinovoj, Founder and CTO of TechTide AI. No vendor pitches, no recycled blog posts.
5 of 23 field notes · 2026 archive
Most AI ROI decks measure enthusiasm. Here is the baseline-first method we use on engagements: one workflow, one metric, cost line next to benefit line, reported monthly.
Cancelled agentic projects are rarely killed by the model. They are killed by unscoped ambition, no owner, no evals, no cost ceiling, and a use case that never needed an agent.
Enterprise AI governance frameworks are unusable at 200 people. Here is the one-page version we install: data boundaries, approved models, logs, review gates, named owner.
Nobody plans an AI budget overrun. They just never set a ceiling. Per-task budgets, tiered routing, context hygiene, caching, and one dashboard with a named owner.
MIT says 95%, Gartner says 40%, vendor decks say 88%. They measure different things. What each stat counts, and the five gaps that separate shipped from shelved.
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