Engineering··7 min read

AI Integration Checklist for Engineering Teams (2026)

A pre-flight checklist for engineering leaders adding AI to production software: data, eval, auth, cost, observability, runbook.

Written byResser Solutions·Hire us for this →

The AI integration checklist for engineering teams below is what we run against every project at Resser Solutions before sign-off. If your project misses more than three of these, you're not ready to go live.

Data

  • Data is accessible to the AI system through proper RBAC, not a service account that bypasses tenant boundaries.
  • PII is identified and redacted before crossing service boundaries when needed.
  • Retention rules for inputs and outputs are documented and enforced.

Eval

  • Eval set of at least 100 cases covering common, edge, and known failure modes.
  • Eval runs in CI on every prompt or model change.
  • Regression on the baseline blocks merge.

Cost

  • Cost telemetry tags every call with feature, tenant, user.
  • Per-request and per-session cost ceiling enforced.
  • Alerting when any cohort exceeds the budget envelope.
  • Prompt caching enabled where the provider supports it.

Reliability

  • Retry logic for transient errors with exponential backoff.
  • Fallback chain to a secondary model on hard rate limit.
  • Graceful degradation: feature explicitly off, not silently broken.
  • Idempotency keys on any mutating call.

Observability

  • Every call traced with input, output, model, confidence, latency.
  • Audit log table for human review when needed.
  • Dashboard for cost, latency, error rate, eval-pass rate, per feature.

Operations

  • Kill-switch per tenant accessible to support without a deploy.
  • Runbook for on-call: common failure modes and remediation steps.
  • Prompt versioning: every prompt change is rollback-safe.
  • Documented model swap procedure.

Security and compliance

  • Provider DPA signed where applicable (GDPR).
  • Sub-processor list updated and disclosed to customers.
  • AI features disclosed in privacy policy.
  • Customer opt-out path for data used in evaluation or fine-tuning.

FAQ

Frequently asked.

Which items are most-skipped?

Eval suite running in CI (the single biggest gap), kill-switch per tenant, prompt versioning, and per-cohort cost alerting. We see these missing on 4 out of 5 projects we audit.

Is 100 eval cases enough?

For most B2B features yes, as long as the cases cover common, edge, and failure modes. Higher-stakes systems (medical, financial, legal) need 500-1000 cases. Coverage matters more than count.

Do you run this audit as a service?

Yes. We do AI integration audits as a standalone engagement when you want a third party to validate the system before launch or before a board review.

What gets you fired if you skip it?

Skipping the kill-switch. The day a model behaves badly on a customer's data and you cannot disable the feature without a deploy is the day a sales call goes wrong.

Have a project like this? Send the brief.

We reply within one business day with a preliminary scope and a rough budget bracket.