Everyone talks about AI models
Whether it’s prompting, reasoning, retrieval or agents, most discussions focus on the intelligence inside the application when building AI software.
What receives far less attention is everything around it. Especially in today’s environment where everyone now has the tools available to spin up new applications in ever-increasingly impressive amounts of time.
Building software that organisations can trust involves much more than choosing the right AI model. Performance, security, reliability and resilience all matter just as much.
AI is only one piece of the puzzle
At Workshop IT, we’re building Jessica to help business analysts with requirements elicitation. Of course the AI is important – and earlier attempts at building Jessica before we had access to today’s models has taught us this.
But so are the systems that deliver every response, protect customer data and will keep the platform available when our customers need it.
Users rarely notice good infrastructure. They only notice when it isn’t there. And it’s easy to put it on the back-burner when your new application is humming along nicely in your DEV environment.
Every startup has to make choices
One of the realities of building an early-stage product is deciding where to spend limited resources.
Every hour spent configuring infrastructure is an hour not spent improving the product.
Every dollar spent solving a problem that’s already been solved is a dollar that can’t be invested elsewhere.
That’s why startup support programs can make a meaningful difference.
Our recent milestone
Recently, Workshop IT was accepted into the Cloudflare for Startups program.
For us, this isn’t about having a logo on our website.
It gives us access to Cloudflare Enterprise infrastructure while we continue developing Jessica.
That means we can spend less time thinking about infrastructure and more time solving the problems we’re actually passionate about and realising the original vision of being the go-to requirements elicitation and intelligence software, whilst still keeping Business Analysts front-and-centre. A philosophy we’ve explored in Every Business Analyst Should Be Doing These Things.
Staying focused
We’re building a new category of software around AI-assisted requirements elicitation.
The Cloudflare for Startups program allows us to keep our attention where we believe it belongs: understanding our future customers, improving Jessica and continuing to provide a user experience we are proud of.
Closing
Building software is rarely a sequence of dramatic breakthroughs. We have found that usually it is a series of small, steady improvements.
This is one of those moments. Now it’s back to building.