We went through this last year. Biggest lesson: when vetting an AI Development Company, ask about their MLOps experience, not just model-building. A lot of firms are great at producing a slick demo model in a Jupyter notebook but have never actually deployed something into a production pipeline with monitoring, retraining, and drift detection. Ask specifically: "Walk me through how you'd monitor this model in production six months after launch." If they fumble that, keep looking.