From AI Prototype to Production

Why this conversation

Many organisations know the situation Luise Freese describes: surrounded by proofs of concept and prototypes, with nothing ever running in production. Luise is a software architect based in Germany and a Microsoft MVP, and she has written a book about getting out of that situation. The host recorded with her at Techorama Netherlands 2026 in Utrecht on Tuesday 27 October 2026, the day of her talk on the same topic, listed on the Techorama schedule as “POC Prison: Why agentic systems never escape the lab and how to fix that in 90 days”.

A 90-day playbook

Asked what she was working on, Luise started with the book. It had been released a few weeks earlier: “And it’s called From Prototypes to Production, and it’s a 90-day playbook for shipping enterprise AI.” Its starting point is a familiar one. “Maybe that situation is familiar to you, that you are surrounded by a lot of proof of concepts, a lot of prototypes, but nothing ever runs in production.”

Her answer is a framework that works on a technical level, on an organisational level, “and even on a cultural level inside an organization”. The host asked whether it also covers security with the regulations that are coming. “Yes, I do.” As for where to buy it: “The book is available everywhere where you can buy books, so just support your local dealer”, or look it up on Amazon. That day’s talk at Techorama was about the topic of the book, a glimpse of what it is about, “in 45 minutes in room 12, so I’m excited about that.”

What comes next

Her roadmap has another book in it, about our relationship to power and AI under capitalism, “more on the political side”. The rest is the daily work: working in Azure, shipping code, deploying, and consulting her customers.

Agentic AI at the mature end

Do her customers use a lot of agentic AI? “Yes, we do, in fact”, Luise said, “which is like maybe not in the way that you might think”. It sits at the very mature end of the scale. Her bar is a customer that has already maxed out rule-based automation and process automation, whose data is intact and not messy, and whose processes are clear. That is where agentic AI can really be put to use.

Dev people and people people

The biggest challenge she has tackled so far is not technical: “getting the dev people to talk to the people people and getting the people people to talk to the dev people.”

“I work all over Europe.” Her smallest customer has 2,000 seats and her biggest 130,000. She also has a big heart for large non-profit organisations: working for an organisation with a good cause is very rewarding, and she never needs to question its purpose.

Where to find Luise

To get in touch with Luise, and to find the book, “that is very, very easy”: she made a website, pocprison.com, with a contact form.

When it comes out

The episode is edited and in the release order. Like every episode it goes out on YouTube first, then on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.