Why AI Applications Struggle Getting to Production

At Tecton, we've observed a consistent pattern of companies investing heavily in AI initiatives but struggling to operationalize them due to the complexity of productionizing data for AI. The issue lies not with model accuracy or technical talent, but with the vast difference between experimental and production data infrastructure. Data pipelines need complete re-engineering, data freshness requirements demand new infrastructure, scale requirements force architectural changes, training-serving consistency becomes a major challenge, and engineering resources get overwhelmed. This cycle perpetuates as better models require more data engineering iteration, leading to delays, reduced stakeholder confidence, and missed opportunities. A better path forward is provided by Tecton's platform, which bridges the data science-production gap by eliminating handoffs, providing consistent data across environments, building complex pipelines, automating scaling and optimization, and reducing engineering overhead.