Industry Scenario — Financial Services

The team: a mid-size regional bank's data/analytics group. The goal: an internal credit-decisioning copilot and a monitored scoring model, on approved infrastructure (hosted, BYO AWS, or self-hosted), with an audit trail — without a per-token vendor bill or a data-residency fight.

The journey

Build · 1 — connect your data

• Connect the internal S3 bucket that holds approved lending history. Metadata is cataloged; rows never leave the tenant.
• Decision: data residency is a design property here — the compliance pass is a walkthrough, not a negotiation.

Build · 2 — explore the catalog

• Explore the catalog. Lineage shows: raw feed → cleansed layer → feature set.
• Decision: when auditors ask "where does the model's input come from?", the answer is one click.

Build · 3 — train the model

• Fine-tune a chat (messages) model on approved, scrubbed call-center dialogues (tone + policy language).
• Post-train with DPO so the model prefers concise, evidence-based answers and refuses to invent advice.
• Every run shows a cost estimate; tick GPU smoke to catch bad data in minutes.
• Decision: LoRA/QLoRA = a fixed ~$1–3k per run, approved up front — not a token bill that scales with usage.

Ship — a guarded rollout

• Deploy with a canary at 10% traffic against the incumbent; cut over only when error rate and score distribution match.
• Data capture on for audit; endpoint in any hosting mode — hosted, BYO AWS, or self-hosted.
• Decision: if a deploy stalls, it can be deleted cleanly — in-flight GPU jobs stop, nothing keeps billing.

Monitor — evidence, not vibes

• Drift schedule on the scoring endpoint: monthly scans give compliance a documented "within tolerance" answer.
• Idle-burn report keeps dev endpoints from silently costing money.

Own it — the gateway

• Inference gateway with per-user API keys + spending limits for internal copilots.

What you own at the end

• A fine-tuned, preference-aligned chat model — your weights, exportable.
• A monitored scoring endpoint on approved infrastructure (hosted, BYO, or self-hosted).
• A documented audit trail and a predictable cost line.

Key docs

Connect · Fine-tune · Post-train · Ship · Monitor · Gateway · Security