Model Routing and Failover Drill (QA)

Model Routing and Failover Drill (QA)

1. 01

   Freeze the current routing table and record which provider serves each client workload

   Note the primary model, the fallback model, and the gateway or orchestration layer in front of both. An agency running Claude as primary with a secondary provider behind a gateway should be able to name the exact failover target per account.

2. 02

   Simulate a primary provider outage during a low-traffic window

   Force traffic to the fallback path and time how long the switch takes. Forrester's 2027 predictions flag compute and energy constraints as the binding limit on AI expansion, and those constraints surface to agencies as provider-side throttling or price moves rather than clean outages.

3. 03

   Compare output quality between primary and fallback on the same client prompt set

   Run ten representative prompts per account through both paths and score them against the client's acceptance criteria. A fallback that degrades tone or reasoning quality is not a fallback, it is a rework queue.

4. 04

   Verify cost per request on the fallback path before declaring the drill passed

   A secondary provider can carry different token pricing, and a failover that doubles unit cost on a fixed-fee retainer erodes margin silently. Record the delta per client and flag any account where the fallback exceeds the primary by more than 20 percent.

5. 05

   Confirm data handling rules hold on every path in the routing table

   Check whether client data enters a shared training pool on the fallback provider. Forrester argues private deployments outperform public ones for B2B marketing because shared model access erases differentiation, so a failover that routes client data into a public pool is a contractual problem, not just a technical one.

6. 06

   Log the drill result and update the client-facing continuity note

   Record switch time, quality delta, and cost delta in one page. Clients buying AI-inclusive retainers are starting to ask what happens when a provider degrades, and a dated drill record answers that question before it is asked.