We've spent the last three years embedded inside product teams shipping LLMs to millions of users. The companies quietly winning share the same posture: AI is not a feature shipped into a product. It's a substrate the product runs on — like a database, like a CDN.
That reframing is load-bearing. If AI is infrastructure, then evals are tests, prompts are contracts, and the operations team owns the uptime of intelligence itself. We'll walk through the exact team topology and the tooling we'd install on day zero.
From there, the playbook is mostly about discipline — guardrails, observability, and the humility to roll back a model the same way you'd roll back a migration.
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