AI SUPPLY CHAIN READINESS CHECKLIST (STARTUP EDITION)

Goal: make your LLM-dependent product controllable under model updates, pricing changes, outages, and procurement scrutiny.

1) CONTROL PLANE / GATEWAY (Week 1–2)
- Put a single gateway in front of all model calls (even if it’s thin at first).
- Support per-tenant config: provider allowlist, model allowlist, region rules.
- Add request IDs and trace IDs that propagate through your app.
- Define logging policy: what you store, what you redact, and retention duration.
- Implement budgets: max output tokens per route + “deny/ degrade/ allow” policy.

2) ROUTING + FALLBACKS (Week 2–3)
- Define routes by task type (classification, extraction, drafting, agentic tool use).
- Choose a fallback provider/model for each critical route.
- Decide failure mode per route: fail closed (no output) vs fail open (best effort).
- Add graceful degradation: smaller context, fewer tools, simplified output schema.
- Maintain a “break glass” config to switch providers without deploying code.

3) EVALS + RELEASE GATES (Week 3–5)
- Build a test set from real workflows (sanitized): at least 20–50 examples per critical route.
- Add deterministic checks where possible (JSON schema validation, regex, tool-call format).
- For subjective outputs, document the grading method and keep it repeatable.
- Gate releases: prompt/model/tool changes must pass evals before rollout.
- Roll out gradually: internal traffic → small customer cohort → full deployment.

4) OBSERVABILITY + INCIDENTS (Week 4–6)
- Dashboard: latency, error rates, fallback frequency, cost per route, cost per tenant.
- Alerts: spend spikes, schema failure spikes, tool-call failure spikes, timeouts.
- Incident runbook: how to flip routes, disable tools, reduce context, or fail closed.
- Post-incident discipline: record what changed (model version, prompt, tool schema).

5) PROCUREMENT ARTIFACTS (Parallel, start now)
- Data flow diagram: where customer data enters, where it is stored, where it is sent.
- Subprocessor list: model providers, cloud, logging/evals vendors; update process.
- Retention statement: logs, prompts, outputs; redaction rules; deletion process.
- Customer controls: tenant-level toggles for logging, retention, and provider selection.

Exit criteria: You can (1) swap providers via config, (2) prove what changed, (3) quantify cost per workflow, and (4) answer procurement questions without scrambling.