Integrating AI into the Enterprise Landscape

All courses / AI Platform and Security / Module 2 / Chapter 12

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

• Explain the two assumptions of classical integration that an AI service breaks.
• Choose between a synchronous call and an event for a given AI integration and justify the choice.
• Describe how a delegated token carries both the service identity and the acting person to a system of record.
• Draft a response contract for a probabilistic service with status, confidence, provenance, model version and disclosure.

Key concepts

Integration seam

The AI gateway as the single seam through which every AI call passes, performing the functions no team should implement twice: authentication and delegated authority, policy enforcement, routing, quotas and budgets, guardrails, logging and tracing, caching and idempotency.

Proposal, not write

AI never writes directly to a system of record. It writes a proposal to an intermediate store or publishes an event, and a deterministic component or a person commits the change, which makes a confident wrong answer recoverable.

Delegated authority

The gateway exchanges the person's token for a short-lived token bound to the AI service's identity, with the person preserved as an act claim. The system of record, not the model, makes the authorisation decision.

Contract for a probabilistic service

An API contract that expresses how confident the service is, where the answer came from, what happens when it cannot answer and which model produced it. Refusal and fallback are first-class outcomes consumers must handle.

Idempotency

A retried request produces no second effect. The gateway stores an idempotency key per request, returns the stored outcome on retry and never re-executes a completed tool call.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Teaching plan

Discussion

1. Collapsing the service identity and the acting person into one is called the most common identity mistake. What does your system of record see today when an AI service calls it?
2. Semantic caching is disabled on Hansa Mutual's claims route. For which content in your organisation would a similar enough answer be acceptable, and for which never?
3. What would each consumer of your AI services do if the service were removed entirely, and has anyone tested it?

Written exercise

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

1. Which of the following is one of the three principles for integrating AI with legacy systems of record?

   1. Give the AI service the legacy system's full command set, since the mainframe treats every caller as a trusted employee
   2. Copy the legacy data into the vector index once and retire the legacy interface
   3. AI never writes directly to a system of record; a deterministic component or a person commits its proposal
   4. Block every transaction of record until the inference call has returned
   Show the answer

   C. AI never writes directly to a system of record; a deterministic component or a person commits its proposal
   The other two principles are an adapter with its own contract and treating the legacy data as a data product with a contract.

2. In the delegated token of Nordvik Region's staff assistant, what do the sub claim and the act claim identify?

   1. The service identity of the assistant and the officer on whose behalf it acts
   2. The officer who signed in and the department that owns the records system
   3. The model version that answered and the prompt version it used
   4. The identity provider that issued the token and the records-management adapter it is meant for
   Show the answer

   A. The service identity of the assistant and the officer on whose behalf it acts
   Both identities reach the adapter, which checks them separately before returning a document, and the audit log records both.

3. When is a model change behind an unchanged API contract a major version, according to the chapter?

   1. Whenever the provider of the model announces a new model family
   2. When the evaluation suite does not pass, as decided by the consumer's contract tests
   3. When the response schema gains an optional field
   4. Whenever the gateway route moves to another region
   Show the answer

   B. When the evaluation suite does not pass, as decided by the consumer's contract tests
   A model change is a minor version if the evaluation suite passes and a major version if it does not; the consumer's contract tests, not the provider's assurances, decide.