SAAP - The Real Deal behind building AI Agents as Standalone Products

The Real Deal: Building AI Agents as Standalone Products

Hey LinkedIn fam! After spending months in the trenches building and shipping AI agents as standalone products, I wanted to share some hard-earned lessons. Let's cut through the hype and talk about what it actually takes to ship an AI agent as a packaged product that customers can run themselves.

Why I Switched from SaaS to SAAP

Let's be real - not everyone wants their AI agents running in the cloud. Many of my enterprise clients were crystal clear: they wanted the whole thing running on their infrastructure. Here's what finally pushed me to build standalone products:

1. A major healthcare client couldn't use our cloud solution due to HIPAA

2. A financial services company needed everything air-gapped

3. Several clients wanted to avoid unpredictable usage-based pricing

The Technical Nitty-Gritty

Here's what you actually need to make this work. I learned some of this the hard way!

This is how I structure agent deployments now

Real Talk: Deployment Challenges

The biggest headaches I faced weren't even in the code - they were in deployment. Here's what you need to handle:

The Integration Part That Nobody Talks About

This is the part that'll make or break your deployment. I learned to always include a robust local API:

Lessons from Production

After deploying to several enterprise clients, here's what I've learned works:

1. Package Everything

my-ai-agent/

├── models/ # Ship with CPU-only by default

├── scripts/

│ ├── install.sh # Make this idiot-proof

│ └── verify.sh # Trust but verify

├── config/

│ └── defaults.yml # Conservative defaults!

└── README.md # Write this like your life depends on it

2. Reality Check

- Your first deployment will fail. Plan for it.

- Customers will ignore system requirements. Handle it gracefully.

- Someone will try to run this on a Raspberry Pi. Have clear error messages ready.

The Update Problem

The Hard Truth About Maintenance

You'll need these monitoring hooks - future you will thank me:

What I'm Building Next

I'm currently working on making these agents even more standalone by:

1. Building better local model quantization

2. Creating smarter resource management

3. Improving the update mechanism

Want to Try This Yourself?

I've learned a ton building these systems, and I'm happy to help others avoid the same pitfalls. Drop a comment if you want me to do a deep dive on any specific part!

#AIEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #SAAP #TechnicalArchitecture #Coding