Why Most RAG Systems Fail in Production

Hosted by Dr. Aki Wijesundara and Manu Jayawardana

Thu, Dec 25, 2025

10:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

Invite your network

Go deeper with a course

AI Engineering Bootcamp & Certificate
Aki Wijesundara, PhD and Manu Jayawardana
View syllabus

What you'll learn

You’ll learn

Why local RAG demos fail at scale, common retrieval mistakes, and how to design production-ready RAG systems.

Who it’s for

Aspiring AI engineers | Software engineers working with LLMs | Technical founders building AI products

Outcome promise

You’ll leave with a clear mental model of what separates toy RAG demos from real systems.

Want to Build This for Real?

Want to actually build RAG systems, not just demos? This is exactly what we go deep on in the AI Engineering Bootcamp.

Why this topic matters

Most RAG demos look impressive, but quietly fail once real users and real data are involved. Teams often underestimate retrieval quality, evaluation, and observability, leading to brittle systems and poor trust.

You'll learn from

Dr. Aki Wijesundara

AI Founder | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Aki Wijesundara is an AI researcher, educator, and founder with a PhD in Machine Learning and experience at Google's AI Accelerator, where he contributed to advancing real-world applications of machine learning and large language models. As Co-Founder of Snapdrum, he helps organizations design, build, and deploy applied AI systems that move beyond prototypes to production-scale impact.

Aki has taught over 5,000+ engineers, founders, and product leaders worldwide how to build production-ready AI systems using LangChain, RAG pipelines, and MLOps frameworks.

He serves as AI Advisor to the United Nations, contributing expertise on responsible AI implementation and policy.

His work bridges cutting-edge research and practical implementation across text, voice, and multimodal AI.

Alongside Snapdrum, Aki serves as CTO of Krybe, an AI voice automation startup, and CTO of Tilli, an edtech company redefining how learners engage with AI-powered education.

Manu Jayawardana

AI Advisor | Co-Founder & CEO at Krybe | Co-Founder of Snapdrum

Manu Jayawardana is a serial entrepreneur and AI advisor with multiple successful ventures in automation and applied AI. As Co-Founder of Snapdrum, he helps enterprises and startups integrate intelligent systems that deliver measurable business results — from AI agents and RAG pipelines to full-scale automation solutions.

Previously, Manu founded and exited Rise AI, a fintech intelligence app with over 35,000 users, acquired by a private investor.

He also serves as CEO of Krybe, an AI voice agent company transforming how businesses automate customer interactions.

With experience across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Manu combines deep technical understanding with strategic execution — helping organizations move from experimentation to scalable, production-grade AI systems.

Previous students from

Google
Meta
Amazon Web Services
NVIDIA
OpenAI

Sign up to join this lesson

By continuing, you agree to Maven's Terms and Privacy Policy.