You have 8 product teams all building AI features independently. Do you build a central AI platform team, and if so, what does it own?

Question

Accepted Answer

Probably yes, but the design determines whether it accelerates or strangles, so I would start with a diagnosis: sit with the 8 teams and inventory what is duplicated, typically provider integration and retries, spend tracking, eval tooling, guardrails, RAG plumbing, where quality diverges dangerously, usually security and data handling, and what they wish existed. That inventory, not org-chart aesthetics, defines the platform charter. The split I hold firm: the platform owns rails, the teams own outcomes. Rails means the model gateway with budgets, fallbacks and tracing; the evals infrastructure, the harness, the judge tooling, the CI integration, while teams own their own eval sets, they know what good looks like in their domain; the guardrail and safety components as consumable middleware; RAG building blocks, connectors, chunking, retrieval services; and the cost and observability dashboards. Teams keep owning prompts, model choice within policy, their features and their metrics, because prompts are product decisions. The anti-bottleneck design is the crux: the platform is self-service golden paths, a team ships a compliant AI feature without talking to anyone, and the paved road is so good that using it is the lazy path. No approval gates except where regulation genuinely demands review, and there, SLAs on the review. Staffing: seed it partly with engineers from the product teams who built the duplicated pieces, sized small, maybe 4 to 6 for 8 teams. Measurement keeps it honest: adoption because it is chosen, not mandated, time-to-first-shipped-AI-feature for a new team, which should drop from months to weeks, incident and spend trends, and a quarterly survey where the product teams grade the platform. If teams are routing around it, that is the platform failing, and the escape hatch stays legal: build your own if the road does not serve you, documented, with your own pager. Paved roads win by being better, not by being mandatory.

Answer

Two teams refuse the gateway because it lacks a provider feature they need. What happens?

That is a platform roadmap signal with a deadline, not a compliance problem: fast-track the feature or grant a documented direct exception with budget accountability. Every workaround is data about where the paved road has potholes.

Answer

How do quality and safety standards propagate if teams own their prompts?

Standards live in the rails: guardrail middleware on by default, eval gates in the shared CI harness, spend and trace visibility automatic. Encode policy in the platform defaults, not in a review meeting.

You have 8 product teams all building AI features independently. Do you build a central AI platform team, and if so, what does it own?

You have 8 product teams all building AI features independently. Do you build a central AI platform team, and if so, what does it own?

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