--- title: "AI Agents That Don’t Suck: How to Build Ones That Actually Drive Business Value - Robert Koch" url: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-agents-that-don-t-suck-how-to-build-ones-that-actually-drive-business-value---robert-koch-vmk4utuqj source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vaIfRXXiIY type: video:youtube source: "NDC Conferences" published: 2026-05-26T10:07:26.144Z updated: 2026-05-26T10:33:23.458Z tags: ["python", "llm", "ai-agents", "prompt-engineering"] reading_time: 56 upvotes: 1 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AI Agents That Don’t Suck: How to Build Ones That Actually Drive Business Value - Robert Koch **[NDC Conferences](https://daily.dev/sources/ndc)** · 56 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A conference talk transcript sharing hard-won lessons from building production AI voice agents at a B2B SaaS startup. Key themes include why most AI agent projects fail (undefined success metrics, poor guardrails, unreliable context), the importance of scoping agents to narrow workflows rather than generic use cases, and real engineering decisions made along the way — including switching from Google Gemini to a transcription-plus-Claude pipeline, separating web and call servers into isolated containers, using prompt caching for 10x cost reduction and faster response times, and implementing eval harnesses for continuous testing. Case studies from Klarna and Mercado Libre illustrate the contrast between broad AI deployments that tanked customer satisfaction and narrowly scoped agents that achieved 87%+ success rates. Security considerations including prompt injection and supply chain attacks are also briefly covered. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: --- Tags: [#python](https://daily.dev/tags/python), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#prompt-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/prompt-engineering) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-agents-that-don-t-suck-how-to-build-ones-that-actually-drive-business-value---robert-koch-vmk4utuqj)