Choosing an AI development company in 2025 means separating demo builders from teams that operate models in production. This checklist is what we recommend enterprise and startup buyers use before signing.
Evaluation before models
Serious AI partners define metrics and evaluation datasets before picking a model. Ask how they measure accuracy, latency, cost per query, and hallucination rate on your data — not generic benchmarks.
Production and MLOps
- CI/CD for prompts and retrieval configs
- Observability dashboards per request
- Rollback strategy for bad deployments
- Data pipeline ownership documented
Security and compliance
Clarify data residency, PII handling, model provider DPAs, and access control. AI systems fail audits when retrieval exposes documents users should not see.
Questions to ask before signing
- Who owns the prompts, embeddings, and fine-tunes?
- What happens if OpenAI or Anthropic changes pricing or policy?
- Show me a production incident you handled.
- How do you hand off to our internal team?
- What is explicitly out of scope?
How Udayra approaches AI delivery
Udayra builds AI for our own products (Intrya, Jyotix) and for clients worldwide. We ship RAG, agents, and ML pipelines with evaluation-first delivery. See our AI development services or hire dedicated AI engineers.