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Beyond Frontend and Backend: Defining the AI Layer

Commit Your Code Conference 2025
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Beyond Frontend and Backend: Defining the AI Layer

I delivered this keynote at Commit Your Code Conference 2025 in Dallas, TX to help product teams move beyond bolting on generic chatbots and instead treat artificial intelligence as a first-class architectural layer.

Why an AI layer matters

  • Strategic leverage: AI is in hyper-growth, but real value comes from aligning intelligence with domain-specific problems instead of novelty features.
  • Architecture evolution: Just as frontend and backend specializations emerged, AI deserves its own layer with clear ownership, tooling, and operational practices.
  • Product differentiation: When done well, bespoke AI systems transform user experiences and unlock new capabilities that competitors cannot easily copy.

Key topics covered

  • Continuous pre-training to keep models aligned with a company’s evolving data and product surface area.
  • Fine-tuning and evaluation loops for building trustworthy, context-aware experiences.
  • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines that ground responses in authoritative knowledge and telemetry.
  • Intelligent AI agents that monitor signals, trigger actions, and proactively improve product functionality.
  • Governance and observability practices that keep AI layers auditable, safe, and measurable.

Audience takeaways

Attendees left with a concrete blueprint for:

  1. Identifying where AI should live within an existing stack.
  2. Designing data contracts, feature stores, and feedback loops that feed the AI layer.
  3. Prioritizing investments that move AI from experimentation to production reliability.
  4. Communicating AI roadmaps to executives and cross-functional partners.

Watch the talk

The live stream recording is available on YouTube, with this talk beginning around the three-hour mark:

Event details

  • Event: Commit Your Code Conference 2025
  • Location: Dallas, Texas
  • Date: March 2025
  • Format: Conference keynote focusing on practical AI architecture strategies for product teams.

If you’d like to bring this session to your event or team, feel free to reach out.