Just Go Live

Copyright Vertical AI 2025. Written by Brian Foody in September, 2025.

Everyone's selling a giant data transformation project as a pre-starter to AI.

The general message seems to boil down to;

"Naughty boy, you haven't been good with your data so far so you're not allowed to play with that shiny AI toy."

Often followed by stern approval from all serious engineering folk.

We're gonna advise something different - Just Go Live.

The Traditional Approach

The traditional approach suggests you need to spend 6-12 months on a data transformation project before you can even start AI work. This leads to delivering your first AI solution 12-18 months down the track. Only to learn then that all that pretty data you bundled into your warehouse isn't that useful in this brave new AI world.

The "Just Go Live" Way

AI systems work with feedback against real world environments. You most likely don't have the data you need to build effective evals of your system. And you would probably be wasting the most valuable build time in decades trying while your competitors get to market first.

Just Go Live is the efficient way to systematically solve this as you develop.

You want to build a self improving feedback loop where you are capturing and labelling data as you go and constantly improving your benchmarks, building equity in your AI system [https://www.verticalai.com.au/blog/2025-08-intellectual-property-in-llms].

You are not going lose the AI race because you didn't have the perfect data warehouse.

You are going to lose it because you never went live, iterated in the real world and learned the nitty gritty lessons.

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At our consulting practice in Perth, Western Australia, we help companies implement AI systems that learn and improve from real-world feedback. If you're ready to move beyond data transformation projects and start building AI that actually works, we can help you design systems that capture value from day one.

Please contact us at hello@verticalai.com.au or visit our website at VerticalAI