Contract for a supportable service, not just access to an agent. Agree pilot rights before testing; use the results to negotiate production scope and commitments.
- Scope and acceptance criteria attached to the agreement.
- Charges for usage, transfers, support, changes and early termination explained.
- Responsibility for integrations, data correction, outages and incident communication assigned.
- Buyer access to required evidence and an agreed retention schedule.
- Approval or notification procedures for material model, prompt, routing and integration changes.
- Regression testing before changes affect the approved workload.
- Numbers, accounts, configurations and export rights addressed in the exit plan.
- A rollback procedure rehearsed by the people who will operate it.
- Monitoring and ongoing human handling included in the operating budget.
These requests align with NIST’s guidance on third-party service agreements, incident responsibilities, change risks and fallback planning; the exact contractual language requires procurement and legal review. (nvlpubs.nist.gov)
NIST’s 9 March 2026 monitoring publication emphasises the importance of post-deployment monitoring for systems whose behaviour can vary unpredictably. Our practical recommendation is to budget monitoring before launch and to expand one dimension at a time—such as another location or appointment type—so changes remain assessable. (nist.gov)
Owners: procurement, service owner and IT. Deliverable: production agreement, operating runbook and staged expansion plan.