Front of the Field: Beyond the Model

Teams spend weeks comparing models, then spend the next six months on data access, context, evaluation and the retries nobody budgeted for. The bill lands in places the business case never mentioned, and the question of whether any of it is actually working usually gets answered late.

What we’ll cover

• Where the spend actually goes in production, and why inference is rarely the biggest line
• The cost of being wrong: retries, review time, and the checking nobody planned for
• What a governed context layer changes, and what it doesn’t
• How teams are working out whether an AI system earns its place