AI Operations · Glossary
DevOps vs. AI Operations
DevOps governs the deployment of code. AI Operations governs the authored decisioning that runs on top of deployed code, sitting one layer above DevOps in the production stack.
DevOps gave the enterprise a discipline for shipping code reliably. Continuous integration, continuous deployment, infrastructure as code, observability, incident response. The substrate is the code artefact.
AI Operations gave the enterprise a discipline for governing what the deployed AI actually decides. Policies that govern decisioning, routines that compose behaviour, evaluation suites that score it, improvement loops that refine it. The substrate is the authored policy library.
A production AI service depends on both. DevOps ships the runtime. AI Operations governs the decisions the runtime makes once it is live. Confusing the two leads to organisations that deploy the agent reliably and govern its behaviour by accident.
The two disciplines share patterns. Versioning, environments, audit trails. They do not share scope.