Lesson 8 · 18 min
Capstone: design a production AI customer support system
Apply all seven layers to one realistic system: a customer support AI for a SaaS product, handling 50,000 queries/day with <2s p95 latency, <$0.005 per query, 99.5% uptime, and GDPR-compliant trace logging.
The requirements
Design a customer support AI for a SaaS product that handles:
- 50,000 queries/day across web chat, email, and in-app widget
- p95 latency < 2s (users are waiting)
- Cost < $0.005/query (50,000/day = $250/day budget)
- 99.5% uptime (max 3.6 hours downtime per month)
- GDPR-compliant trace logging
- Graceful degradation when the primary provider is down
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