The outcome
Select a model and provider policy based on measured quality, cost, latency, and privacy.
Step by step
A workflow you can repeat.
- 01
Define representative prompts, expected outputs, safety cases, context sizes, and a scoring rubric.
- 02
Shortlist models that support the required modalities, tools, structured output, region, and context window.
- 03
Run identical tests with fixed parameters and record quality, latency, token usage, errors, and effective cost.
- 04
Inspect provider data policies and repeat tests with the routing and privacy constraints planned for production.
- 05
Choose a primary and fallback set, document failure thresholds, and rerun the evaluation when models change.
Working standard
What good use looks like.
- Use several realistic test cases.
- Measure provider behavior, not only model labels.
- Version the evaluation set.
Official references