Your AI Feature Is Only As Reliable As The ETL Pipeline Nobody Owns
The AI feature has the dashboard. The prompt has the version control. The eval suite has the on-call rotation. And then there is the upstream cron job, written in 2022, owned by a team that rotated out of analytics two reorgs ago, that produces the CSV your retrieval index is built from. That cron job has no SLA. That CSV has no schema contract. The team that owns it does not know it feeds an AI feature. When it changes — and it will change — the AI team will spend three weeks debugging a prompt that did nothing wrong.
The AI quality regression you are about to chase is almost never an AI problem. It is an ETL problem wearing an AI costume. The discipline that has to land is the seam between the two — the contract, the lineage, the freshness signal, the paired on-call — and the team that does not formalize it ships an AI feature whose reliability is bounded by the least-loved cron job in the company.
