The solutions-engineer’s job is the technical win, and the demo is the audition. Wrap an LLM API into something a buyer trusts in an afternoon — start from the cookbook, lock the output with strict-mode tool calls, ship the smallest credible chat shell, and gate it with a 20-question smoke test before you ever click “share screen.”

• →Rapid AI Prototyping

The “see, it works on YOUR data” moment is what wins the technical evaluation — and it’s the moment most likely to hallucinate. Build grounded retrieval over the customer’s docs with the cookbook Search-Ask pattern, a visible citation panel, an enforced refusal, and a 20-question grounding gate — then know when to graduate to agentic retrieval.

• →Grounded Customer Answers

When the demo has to DO things — qualify a lead, triage a ticket, draft a reply, route to a specialist — you’re building an agent. The Thought-Action-Observation loop, the four recurring sales/support agent roles, choosing a control surface (speed vs. control vs. visible guardrails), and the human-in-the-loop gate that keeps a demo from doing something irreversible on stage.

• →Safe Agent Workflows

One paste of real customer data into the wrong surface is a regulatory incident — and the buyer’s security review is where most pilots quietly die. Synthetic-first by default, a Presidio sanitizer on both sides of the model, four-layer tenant isolation you can’t retrofit cheaply, indirect prompt injection via retrieved docs, and the vendor control matrix a CISO will audit.

• →Secure Demo Delivery

Assemble the whole track into one flagship demo: an agent that researches an account, grounds findings in real sources, and drafts personalized outreach a human approves before send — built synthetic-first, scrubbed, tenant-isolated, gated by a smoke test. The full architecture, the numbers and tradeoffs to defend, and a rehearsal of the build-and-present interview that decides the offer.

• →Rapid AI Prototyping
• →Grounded Customer Answers
• →Secure Demo Delivery