Your AI prototype is impressive, the demo gets applause, and then production happens. Suddenly you’re dealing with weird edge cases, shifting outputs, unclear ownership, and a stack of tools that don’t quite add up to something your company can trust. We sit down with Shanea Leven, co-founder and CEO of Empromptu AI and the founder of CodeSee (acquired by GitKraken), to talk about what it really takes to move from “it works” to “it’s reliable.” 

We dig into why AI is not just another SaaS feature, and how non-deterministic systems demand a different approach to engineering: clean data, system-level guardrails, monitoring, and evaluations that define what “good” means for each workflow. Shanea shares a practical way to think about accuracy across use cases and why edge case detection is where enterprise AI lives or dies. If you’re building AI agents, internal copilots, or customer-facing AI products, this is the part that decides whether you earn trust or burn it. 

Then we get into the long game: the difference between renting intelligence from third-party foundation models and building an intelligent asset your company owns. We talk dependency risk, business continuity, open-weight models, and when it makes sense to fine-tune or train custom models using expert feedback and real operational workflows. Shanea also shares lessons from raising a lean pre-seed in a market obsessed with mega-rounds, plus what she’s learned as a second-time founder leading with conviction. 

If this sparks new questions about your AI roadmap, subscribe, share the episode with a builder on your team, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Stay Connected with Shanea Leven and Empromptu AI

🔗 Shanea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaneak/

🔗 Empromptu AI: https://empromptu.ai/