Why AI work stalls after the demo — Marc Lapointe, Lapointe Labs

Marc Lapointe runs Lapointe Labs. The pattern I keep seeing is not a model problem: a demo works in an afternoon, then the work that would make it real never becomes anyone's job. Weeks pass. The pilot stays a pilot.

What usually stalls the work is ordinary. Nobody owns the retrieval path into real documents. Eval is a vibe check instead of a number. Retries, auth, and cost controls are left for "later." The person who built the prototype has already moved on. Agencies hand off a slide deck and call it delivery.

Lapointe Labs exists for that gap. I am a working software engineer — retrieval over private corpora, agent workflows in production — and I take a small number of two-week AI Implementation Audits. The audit finds those ordinary reasons, puts numbers on them, and sequences the fixes. The person on the call is the person in the repo.

If your AI work has stopped moving after a promising demo, that is the engagement. Book thirty minutes and tell me where it stopped.