How we slashed an AI Agent's latency by 80% in 60 minutes

Building an AI agent is fun. Fixing its production latency when it's juggling live data, RAG, and text-to-speech? Not so fun.

In the latest episode of the AI Agent Clinic, we sat down with developer Sami Maghnaoui to debug PlaybackIQ, a football / soccer agent he built to provide pre and post match analysis with text to voice, and minute-by-minute match insights with interactive UI.

The app was awesome, but under heavy "match day" data loads, the wait times were killing the UX.

Here’s how we fixed it:

• The Bottleneck: We implemented OpenTelemetry on the Agent Platform to trace exactly where the LLM calls and data retrieval were hanging up.




• The Scale: We shifted the deployment to Cloud Run to properly handle concurrent traffic.




• The Result: We managed to slash the agent's latency by 80%.

If you're dealing with sluggish LLM response times in your own apps and want to see what a production-grade fix looks like, we recorded the whole teardown and rebuild.

🎥 Watch the teardown here:

[https://youtu.be/G7olcqETSn8]

(Let me know in the comments what your go-to stack is for tracing LLM latency!)