Runway couldn't fix a bug in its AI video model, so it turned the bug into a feature

Runway spent weeks trying to engineer its way out of a stubborn bug: AI-generated avatars would drift off-center during real-time video generation. The fix wasn't a back-end patch — it was a new front-end feature that just worked around the problem. That's the kind of lesson Ryan Phillips, head of enterprise product at Runway ML, walked through at VB Transform 2026 , arguing that even companies not building foundation models themselves can learn from how Runway builds, evaluates, and ships them.