Building an AI Sourcing System for Industrial Components: What We Learned

I want to talk about a class of AI system design problem that doesn't get much attention. Most of the AI architecture content out there is about making systems smarter, faster, or capable. RAG pipelines, fine-tuning, better prompts, multi-agent orchestration. All useful stuff. But there's a different problem that comes up the moment you deploy AI into a domain where output precision is non-negotiable. And the solution isn't a smarter model. It's a smarter system design around the model. We ran into this building an AI sourcing system for industrial components. Here's what we learned.