Architecting Production-Ready Gen AI and Agentic AI Systems

A successful AI demonstration proves that a model can respond. A production-ready AI system must prove much more.

It must operate within defined authority, retrieve the right enterprise knowledge, protect sensitive data, survive model and provider changes, control cost, expose its behaviour through telemetry, and produce evidence that engineering, risk and governance teams can examine.

Architecting Production-Ready Gen AI and Agentic AI Systems is a practitioner-focused guide to designing generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation and agentic systems for real enterprise environments.

The book moves beyond isolated prompts and model APIs to examine the architecture surrounding the model: AI gateways, orchestration, retrieval pipelines, memory, tool contracts, evaluation systems, security controls, observability, FinOps, human approval and governance evidence.

Using the recurring NovaCred case study, the book demonstrates how a regulated organisation can progress from policy-grounded generation to controlled agentic workflows without allowing autonomy to advance faster than its operational and governance maturity.

Readers will learn how to:

• Distinguish AI-added, AI-first, generative, agentic and hybrid systems
• Assess organisational readiness and system maturity before increasing autonomy
• Design a canonical enterprise architecture for production AI
• Build reliable retrieval and knowledge-grounding pipelines
• Define tool permissions, action tiers, approval gates and rollback paths
• Architect single-agent and multi-agent systems
• Treat prompt engineering as a governed engineering discipline
• Create evaluation suites, release thresholds and regression controls
• Defend against prompt injection, data leakage and excessive agency
• Measure model, retrieval, tool and workflow behaviour in production
• Control token consumption, model-routing costs and agent execution budgets
• Convert governance requirements into runtime controls and auditable evidence

This book is written for enterprise architects, AI engineers, platform leaders, technology executives, product owners, data professionals, security teams, risk officers and governance practitioners responsible for moving AI systems from experimentation into dependable production.

The central principle is straightforward: the model is only one component. Production readiness is a property of the entire system.