Introduction
Enterprise AI initiatives often begin with a promising demo and end without a production owner. The missing ingredient is rarely the model. It is the data contract.
Section 01
The data contract
A useful data contract defines sources, freshness, access controls, evaluation criteria, and the human oversight required when the system is wrong.
If nobody owns evaluation, the pilot owns the narrative—and production owns the risk.
Section 02
Production operations
Without that agreement, teams optimize prompts against incomplete knowledge bases, then discover that legal, security, and operations were never prepared to support the workflow.
Practical enterprise AI starts with a use case, a governed data path, and a production operating model—not with unconstrained experimentation.
FAQs
Do we need a custom model?
Often no. Start with governed data access and a measurable workflow. Model choice follows accountability—not the reverse.
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