The last two years have been wild! LLM breakthroughs, massive awareness and LLM demos everywhere. On the other side, not many made it beyond the POC stage. In 2024, we saw teams on two different trajectories: Some get lost in the POC stage. Some go to production. In this talk, we increase your odds of being on the latter. We walk through key technologies, assess their maturity and in which cases they are the “right hammer”. We share learnings from our work with thousands of Haystack open source users.