Shipping with Foundation Models

You’re the product owner in the room when someone says, “Let’s add AI.” Suddenly you’re expected to pick a model family, debate latency trade-offs, calm legal, and design a safe UX—without an ML background and with a roadmap that can’t slip. Shipping with Foundation Models turns that pressure into a concrete, repeatable path from vague ambition to shippable feature. Aimed at non-technical product leaders, it shows how to move from loose ideas to a clearly framed use case, a realistic pilot, and a launch you can defend to executives, customers, and regulators. Instead of math and model internals, the focus stays on outcomes, risks, and decisions. You’ll learn how to articulate foundation-model opportunities in business terms, write problem-first requirements, and design flows that keep users oriented when the model behaves unpredictably. Practical checklists, vendor scorecards, and pilot templates help you compare providers, align with design and legal on guardrails, and choose metrics that reveal real quality, latency, and cost trade-offs. Chapters walk through the full lifecycle: clarifying the use case, understanding capabilities and limits, defining outcomes, designing trustworthy UX, selecting vendors, building and evaluating prompts, handling privacy and data basics, running lightweight pilots, and scaling cross-functionally once something works. The result is a compact operating manual for PMs, adjacent leaders, and founders who need to make clear, defensible decisions about foundation-model-powered features—without pretending to be AI engineers.