An AI Rollout Checklist

From plan to post-launch

Is there a signed rollout plan with success and guardrail metrics, owners and decision rights? Did the evaluation pass overall and per slice, with red-team blockers at zero? Are costs and latency within budget at full scale? Is the feature behind a deterministic flag with a tested kill switch and a fallback? Are cohorts defined and support briefed? Are runtime checks, circuit breakers and spend caps in place? Are dashboards split by config version, with automatic rollback triggers and sampled human review? Are users informed and incident runbooks ready? Do upgrades re-run all gates?

The checklist

Tick every box before each stage.

[ ] rollout plan: metrics, thresholds, stages, owners, decision rights
[ ] eval passed overall + every slice floor; red-team blockers = 0
[ ] cost and latency budgets checked at 100% scale
[ ] deterministic flag, tested kill switch, designed fallback
[ ] cohorts defined; support briefed with per-customer switch
[ ] input/output checks; timeouts; circuit breaker; spend caps + alerts
[ ] dashboards by config version / cohort; AI vs control
[ ] automatic rollback rules tested in a drill
[ ] sampled human review (targeted + random) feeding the eval set
[ ] disclosure in product; incident runbook; upgrade gates

Re-use the plan for changes

Copy the launch plan for every significant prompt or model change; it is a smaller version of the same process.

Quick check: Which item belongs on an AI rollout checklist?

• Skipping slice-level evaluation
• Launching to 100% on day one
• A tested kill switch with a designed fallback experience
• Hiding that content is AI-generated