Most AI programs do not fail on the model. They fail on the platform. Foundry's 2026 research puts integration cost (36%) and missing in-house deployment expertise (33%) at the top of the barrier list, ahead of anything to do with model quality. Enterprise AI RFPs now put 20% of the score on deployment and infrastructure and another 15% on observability and cost control.
An inference workload does not behave like a web application. GPU capacity is scarce and expensive, retrieval needs low-latency storage, and traffic arrives in bursts that autoscaling tuned for page views handles badly. If the environment was sized for last year's application, the pilot works and production does not.
Then there is the bill. Cloud spend grows with usage and with neglect: idle instances, over-provisioned databases, storage in the wrong class, no budget alerts. Without FinOps discipline, the cost of running AI erases the savings it produced.