Demo Is Not Production, with Ajay Nair, GM of Elasticsearch and Platform at Elastic

Today, we're talking to Ajay Nair, General Manager of Elasticsearch and Platform at Elastic. We discuss why most AI hallucinations are really a search problem wearing a scarier name, how the industry's obsession with model selection is missing the real bottleneck of context and retrieval, and why the biggest failure mode in enterprise AI is mistaking a working demo for a production system.

All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!

To learn more about Elastic, check their website here

About Ajay Nair

I'm an engineering leader with over a decade of experience building large-scale distributed systems and platform businesses at global scale. I was one of the founding members of the AWS Lambda team, later becoming General Manager and helping shape the product strategy and roadmap for AWS Lambda and the broader serverless portfolio work, I also captured as a co-author of "Serverless Architectures on AWS." As my time at AWS progressed, I took on a broader mandate leading the container services portfolio, spanning EKS, ECS, AWS Batch, and Elastic Beanstalk. Before AWS, I spent years at Microsoft working on Bing's big data platforms. Making the move from a twenty-thousand-person cloud organization to a fast-growing, open-source-rooted search company taught me how to move with more speed and stay closer to the engineers and customers actually building on the technology. Currently, I'm General Manager of Platform at Elastic, leading the engineering teams behind Elasticsearch and Kibana, focused on giving enterprises the search, observability, and security foundation they need to put AI to work on their own data rather than be left behind by it.