Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Testing a FastAPI app that calls OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini gets expensive fast. The problem is not just the API bill in production. It is all the repeated traffic in development: prompt tweaks, CI runs, regression checks, and the load tests you keep putting off because every run burns tokens. Hand-written mocks do not help much once the app is doing multi-step LLM work.

IT leaders today are in a high-stakes gridlock between the pressure to invest in new AI solutions and legacy systems that aren’t equipped to support them. With the pace of work today, long modernization projects are often untenable. They disrupt your workflows. They use up your team’s resources. And they sometimes fail to deliver results. So how do successful organizations move forward? They rethink their approach.

It is Monday morning. Your VP of Engineering just forwarded a company-wide memo: every team needs to demonstrate AI adoption by end of quarter. At the same time, you learned last week that your QA budget was trimmed by 15%, because leadership assumes AI will "make testing more efficient." And your developers? Thanks to Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code, they are now shipping 76% more code per person than they were two years ago.

Most teams know they are spending money on AI in production. Far fewer realize how much they are spending outside production. It’s easy to get lost as you evaluate which model has the best responses, is fast enough, and cheap enough to run in production. That is because the AI bill usually shows up as a giant blob. It is easy to see the total.

Your AI agent just placed 47 duplicate orders. It called the wrong API three times in a row. It looped through the same workflow for six minutes before anyone noticed. Nobody caught it in testing because nobody built the right tests. That's not a hypothetical. Enterprises using AI agents face this exact problem every week. The AI agent works perfectly in staging, but fails silently in production, and by the time the on-call engineer gets alerted, real customers are already affected.

Product teams tasked with providing an AI analytics and BI platform to finance organizations see a unique set of challenges. Finance organizations are subject to SOX, GDPR, EU AI Act compliance on top of accurately closing the books and preparing for the potential of an audit. In a highly regulated industry like finance, product leaders building solutions for finance leaders need accurate insights they can trust that hold up to audits and regulatory scrutiny.

The rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents and Large Language Models (LLMs) is transforming how businesses operate. From automating customer service to generating complex reports, AI agents are becoming indispensable. However, this explosion of AI-driven interactions brings with it significant challenges in management, security, and governance.

Enterprise adoption of large language models introduces a fundamental security challenge: how do you grant AI agents access to internal data without creating a backdoor that bypasses your existing access controls? Traditional database connections rely on service accounts with broad permissions, but when an LLM queries your customer records or financial data on behalf of a user, it must respect that user's specific entitlements.

Most enterprises have made the commitment to AI. They’ve approved the budgets, stood up the pilots, and named it a strategic priority. So why are 95% of them getting zero return on $30–40 billion in GenAI investment? According to MIT research cited in Hitachi Vantara’s 2025 State of Data Infrastructure Global Report — which surveyed more than 1,200 IT leaders across 15 markets — the failure isn’t the model. It’s the infrastructure underneath it.