Operations, Rollout, and Ownership

Operate GenAI systems with SLOs, incident response, progressive rollout, and clear organizational accountability.

Production is a continuing operating model. Someone must own quality, tools, data, policies, costs, incidents, and change approval after the launch team moves on.

Define SLOs Around User Outcomes

Useful indicators include successful task completion, grounded-answer rate, unsafe-action rate, escalation rate, latency, availability, and cost per successful task. Model uptime alone does not show whether the product works.

Roll Out Progressively

1. Internal or synthetic traffic
2. Human-supervised pilot
3. Limited user cohort
4. Canary with rollback thresholds
5. Broader rollout after behavioral and operational evidence

Prepare for Incidents

Runbooks should cover provider failure, quality regression, prompt injection, data exposure, runaway costs, tool side effects, and corrupted memory or retrieval indexes. Immediate controls may include disabling a tool, switching to read-only mode, reverting a configuration bundle, or routing to a deterministic fallback.

Assign Ownership