The modern customer has just one need that matters: Getting the thing they want when they want it. The old standard RAG model embed+retrieve+LLM misunderstands intent, overloads context and misses freshness, repeatedly sending customers down the wrong paths. Instead, intent-first architecture uses a lightweight language model to parse the query for intent and context, before delivering to the most relevant content sources (documents, APIs, people).Enterprise AI is a speeding train headed for a cliff. Organizations are deploying LLM-powered search applications at a record pace, while a fundamental architectural issue is setting most up for failure.A recent Coveo study revealed that 72% of enterprise search queries fail to deliver meaningful results on the first attempt, while Gartner also predicts that the majority of conversational AI deployments have been falling short of enterprise expectations.The problem isn’t the underlying models. It’s the architecture around them.After designing and running live AI-driven customer interaction platforms at scale, serving millions of customer and citizen users at some of the world’s largest telecommunications and healthcare organizations, I’ve come to see a pattern. It’s the difference between successful AI-powered interaction deployments and multi-million-dollar failures.It’s a cloud-native architecture pattern that I call Intent-First. And it’s reshaping the way enterprises build AI-powered experiences.The $36 pillion problem Gartner projects the global conversational AI market will balloon to $36 billion by 2032. Enterprises are scrambling to get a slice. The demos are irresistible. Plug your LLM into your knowledge base, and suddenly it can answer customer questions in natural language.Magic. Then production happens. A major telecommunications provider I work with rolled out a RAG system with the expectation of driving down the support call rate. Instead, the rate increased. Callers tried AI-powered search, were provided incorrect answers with a high degree of confidence and called customer support angrier than before.This pattern is repeated over and over. In healthcare, customer-facing AI assistants are providing patients with formulary information that’s outdated by weeks or months. Financial services chatbots are spitting out answers from both retail and institutional product content. Ret …
