The existing order pipeline was a synchronous chain of HTTP calls. At peak traffic, tail latency and failures cascaded: a slow downstream caused order timeouts, duplicate writes from naive retries, and intermittent data inconsistency. The business needed to grow 10x without growing incidents.

Support and product teams were drowning in repetitive questions that were already answered in our docs, tickets, and runbooks. Earlier RAG attempts were 'demo-great, production-bad': plausible answers, frequent hallucinations, no trust signals.

A single noisy customer could degrade the platform for everyone. We needed isolation that didn't explode costs, plus a story for running the biggest customers on dedicated infrastructure.