The AI Chatbot Death Spiral: Why Demos Work But Production Fails

Agencies demo with curated data and have no plan for accuracy degradation. In production, user language evolves, edge cases accumulate, and model drift goes unnoticed until customers complain. We break down the chatbot death spiral—Week 1: 95% → Week 8: 60%—and the monitoring, feedback loops, and retraining strategies that actually keep production chatbots reliable.