Shipping production AI without breaking your stack

Legacy systems rarely fail because of the model. They fail because AI features are bolted on without contracts for latency, identity, and data access.

Treat every AI capability as a service with SLAs: input schema, timeout behavior, fallback path, and a clear owner on-call.

Start behind a feature flag. Measure quality with human review samples before you expand traffic. Expand only when the failure modes are boring.