India, Oct. 7 -- Another day and another new model grabs the limelight. Product teams scramble to see how it can be used for their own operations and systems.

But a new model can look great in a demo and still make a product worse.

It may cost less but respond too slowly, pass offline tests but fail with real customers, or behave differently once traffic and context change. That is why the engineering question is shifting from which model to use to how teams prove a model change is safe and worth making.

At Inc42's The CTO Summit 2026 last week, leaders from Swiggy, Rapido, Razorpay, ShareChat, Shadowfax and Meesho described building evaluations or evals and monitoring into the model lifecycle. And as platforms and products grow, evals...