Adding a chat box to a product takes an afternoon. Making it reliable enough that people depend on it takes discipline. Here is the checklist we use.
Ground every answer
Models are excellent at language and unreliable at facts they were never given. Retrieval, tool calls into your own APIs and clear source citations turn a confident guesser into a useful colleague.
Build an evaluation set first
Before writing prompts, collect a few hundred real questions with known good answers. Run them on every change. Without evals you are tuning by vibes.
Design for failure
The best AI features know when to stop. Detect low confidence, hand over to a human with context, and make it easy for users to correct mistakes.
Keep humans in the loop
Review dashboards, feedback buttons and audit logs aren't overhead; they are how the feature gets better every week.