Why AI Assistants Fail in Production: A Runbook for Handoffs, Latency, Hallucinations, and User Loops

This article provides a practical runbook for operators dealing with AI assistant failures in production. It argues that most failures are system issues, not just model issues, and lists common symptoms like user loops, unsupported answers, slow responses, and wrong handoffs. It introduces a failure decision tree to classify problems across routing, retrieval, generation, tooling, handoff, and expectation mismatch. It emphasizes the need for telemetry, validation tests, rollback paths, and accountable ownership, and advises against prompt rewrites before understanding the evidence path. The content is technical and operational, aimed at IT professionals managing AI systems.