An AI feature without an owner is a demo

The last two years produced a wave of assistants that never left a pilot. Not because the model was weak, but because nobody owned what happened when it was wrong, slow, or confident about a document it had not seen.

If you cannot say who is accountable for a bad answer, you do not have a product feature. You have a branded autocomplete.

Three things before the model

A job with a measurable cost of error. A corpus you are allowed to use. A fallback that a person can complete without the model.

Then you can talk about retrieval, evaluation sets, tracing, and how the feature appears in the existing product — not as a new island with its own login.

We ship assistants, then we widen

Our default is a human in the loop. Automation expands only where evaluation shows the error rate is acceptable for that job. That is slower to announce and faster to keep.