Will White

Senior AI Engineer
Thrive Learning
UK

About

Will White is a Senior AI Engineer at Thrive Learning, specialising in production agentic AI systems. Over the past seven years, he has worked across data science, machine learning, and AI engineering, with experience in fintech at CarFinance247, at Meta, and in public service as a former police officer. He has developed and shipped production conversational agents at both Thrive Learning and CarFinance247, with a recent focus on LangGraph, agent evaluation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and reliable AI system design. Will also shares practical insights on agentic AI through his YouTube channel.
Talk

Will White | From Prototype to Production: Building Reliable Conversational Agents with LangGraph

AI, Conversational Agents, LangGraph
Conversational agents are easy to prototype and much harder to operate reliably in production. In this talk, Will White shares lessons from deploying LangGraph-based conversational agents at Thrive Learning, where a multi-tenant agent setup handles thousands of conversations every day.The production system includes streaming responses, specialised agents for coaching, analytics, and chat, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) database, and an evaluation and monitoring layer using Arize AX. Drawing from this experience, Will shows how LangGraph can help teams move beyond fragile agent demos towards systems with clearer control flow, better observability, safer tool use, and more maintainable architecture.The talk covers practical production patterns including state management, graph-based orchestration, monitoring and evaluations, human-in-the-loop workflows, agentic RAG, idempotent identifiers, prompt caching, summarisation, and context management. It also covers the trade-offs: where LangGraph adds real value, where it increases complexity, and how to decide whether the learning curve is worth it.Attendees will leave with a practical checklist for designing, testing, monitoring, and evolving conversational agents in production.