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AI Shared Services

Summary​

AI shared services provide reusable enterprise capabilities such as model access, AI gateway controls, prompt and evaluation tooling, retrieval services, observability, safety filters, and approved deployment templates. They let product teams move faster without rebuilding core controls.

Why This Matters​

  • Without shared services, every AI team repeats security, logging, evaluation, and provider integration work.
  • Shared services turn governance into usable platform capabilities.
  • Reusable services make cost, reliability, and policy controls visible across the portfolio.

Core Concepts​

  • AI gateway for model routing, policy enforcement, usage tracking, and cost controls.
  • Reusable retrieval, embedding, prompt, evaluation, and observability capabilities.
  • Golden paths for common patterns such as RAG, copilots, batch summarization, and workflow automation.
  • Service ownership with SLAs, onboarding guides, roadmaps, and support channels.

Use this flow to set decision order, gate criteria, and rollout readiness before implementation starts.

Diagram​

Implementation Steps​

  1. Identify duplicated AI capabilities across pilots and convert the most common into shared services.
  2. Publish a service catalog with onboarding steps, owners, SLAs, and approved use cases.
  3. Build golden-path templates for the top delivery patterns.
  4. Expose usage, cost, reliability, and control-health metrics to service owners and product teams.
  5. Retire or consolidate services that do not reach adoption, reliability, or value thresholds.

Realistic Example​

Three business units built separate RAG pipelines with different embedding models and logging. The platform team created a shared retrieval service with approved connectors, access filtering, evaluation scripts, and observability, reducing duplicated work and improving audit readiness.

Senior Tech vs Dev Conversation​

Senior Tech: When should something become a shared service? Dev: When multiple teams need it and centralizing it improves control, reuse, or cost. Senior Tech: What should stay with product teams? Dev: Domain workflow design, user experience, and business-specific acceptance criteria.

UX/UI Checklist​

  • Show service owner, SLA, onboarding path, and supported patterns.
  • Expose service health, usage, cost, and policy status.
  • Provide templates and examples that teams can run quickly.
  • Make request, support, and exception paths obvious.

Common Pitfalls​

  • Centralizing everything and slowing product teams down.
  • Publishing shared services without support or ownership.
  • Building platform capabilities before repeated product demand is proven.
  • Measuring service success only by consumption rather than business outcomes.

References and Next Steps​