World Congress 2026 Europe

Cutting LLM Costs Without Cutting Quality: How to Beat Proprietary LLMs with Fine-Tuned Open Source

July 9, 2026 16:10 – 16:40 · 30 min Stage 9

What this session covers

Let’s cut through the hype: most AI agents never make it past the demo stage. The gap between a working prototype and a production-grade system comes down to one thing—evaluation. Without reliable metrics, you’re guessing at what’s working, what needs fixing, and whether your agents are actually improving. You’ll learn how to: - Define custom metrics tailored to your use case - Calibrate LLM judges for cost-effective assessments - Track evaluation results over time to measure real progress

Whether you’re building LLM-powered apps or leading AI teams, you’ll leave with actionable tools to move from proof-of-concept to production—with the transparency and reliability enterprises demand.

World Congress 2026 Europe

Related talks

Open session

Fine-Tuning Small Language Models for Agentic AI

  • Björn Buchhold

    CID

    Technology Evangelist

Open session

Rules, Heuristics, or LLMs? Lessons from Solving the Same Problem Twice

  • Artur Naumenko

    Softeta

    Senior Software Engineer

Open session

LLMs in the wild: Building an AI agent that survives production

  • Steven Mi

    GetYourGuide

    Senior MLOps Engineer

  • Giampaolo Casolla

    GetYourGuide

    Senior Data Scientist

Open session

From Hallucination to Justification: Hands-On Explainability for LLMs

  • Lucía Conde-Moreno

    Info Support

    Software Engineer

  • Tessel Haagen

    Info Support

    Consultant Data AI

All sessions at this congress