Building Real-World AI Systems in Production with OpenAI’s Emre Okcular

Brandon interviews Emre Okcular, a Solutions Architect in Applied AI at OpenAI, about what it actually takes to build and deploy AI systems in production. Emre works directly with organizations to design, evaluate, and deploy AI-powered products and workflows. In this conversation, he explains how Applied AI bridges research, product development, and real-world business value. Topics include: Enterprise AI deployments AI agents and long-running workflows Customer support chatbots, voice agents, and OCR Moving from demo to production LLMOps and observability Loop engineering and evaluations Memory and context engineering Cost, scaling, and adoption One of the key themes of the conversation is non-determinism. Traditional software systems typically return the same output every time. AI systems are different. Building reliable AI systems requires a different engineering mindset. 00:00 Embrace Non-Determinism 00:48 Meet Emre Okcular 01:59 What Applied AI Means 03:24 Enterprise AI Use Cases 07:52 Long-Running AI Agents 09:31 From Demo to Production 12:33 LLMOps Explained 14:17 Loop Engineering & Evals 23:09 Memory for AI Agents 26:15 Tools and Frameworks 27:04 What Engineers Get Wrong About AI 29:30 Cost, Scaling & Adoption 31:21 Advice for Students 32:58 Lightning Round 33:58 Thanks and Subscribe 🎙️ Watch the demo:    • How AI Agent Memory Actually Works: Trimmi...   ________________________ 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗠𝗲 • LinkedIn:   / brandonkrakowsky   • Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative: https://ai-analytics.wharton.upenn.edu 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀 • Interviews:    • Learn the Technology: Interviews   • How To Videos:    • Learn the Technology: How To Videos   • Spotify: https://bit.ly/47JxADO 𝗙𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗠𝗲 • Instagram:   / learnthetechnologywithbk   • TikTok:   / learnthetechnologywithbk   • X (Twitter): https://x.com/LearnTechWBK • GitHub: https://github.com/learnthetechnology... 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗿𝗮 • Intro to Programming with Python and Java: https://www.coursera.org/specializati... • How to Use Data: https://www.coursera.org/specializati...