AgentOps · Production readiness · Independent framework

Your AI agent works. Now make it production-ready.

The 7 Production Gates identifies the purpose, evidence, authority, control, evaluation and operational gaps that still stand between a working agent and a responsible production release.

Book a Production Readiness Review See the seven gates
35+ assessment criteria100-point readiness score5 business days from artifact receipt

Where this helps

Built for teams that already have an agent.

You have moved beyond the idea stage. The agent can perform an end-to-end task, and now the production questions are getting harder.

A strong fit

  • A working agent or agentic prototype exists
  • The agent calls tools, APIs or business systems
  • An internal team owns implementation
  • Production is the next objective
  • Architecture, security, evaluation or governance questions remain unresolved

What we need to examine

  • Whether the task should be agentic at all
  • Where human and deterministic authority must remain
  • What evidence supports each readiness claim
  • How failures, exceptions and rollback are handled
  • Who owns the agent after release

The framework

The 7 Production Gates

Each gate asks for evidence. A polished demonstration, a policy written for later or a safeguard that exists only in a prompt does not count as proof.

01

Purpose and Scope

Does the agent have a legitimate, bounded purpose with a clear owner?

02

Data and Evidence

Is its evidence trustworthy, authorized, traceable and fit for the decision?

03

Architecture and Tool Authority

Does the architecture enforce limits on autonomy, tools and permissions?

04

Safety and Governance

Are safety, accountability, accessibility and escalation operational?

05

Evaluation and Validation

Has the complete system been tested under realistic conditions?

06

Deployment and Release

Can the approved system be released safely, gradually and reversibly?

07

Observability and Continuous Improvement

Can the organization continuously prove the system remains worthy of production?

Case study

Client A: Sign language AI evaluation

A working recognition and avatar-generation system needed more than a polished demonstration. See how the Seven Production Gates separated the benchmark, governance and release evidence required for a defensible production decision.

From promising output to measurable evidence

  • Seven-fold signer-disjoint recognition protocol
  • Motion, hand, timing and non-manual generation measures
  • Reproducible model, prompt, seed and artifact records
  • Clear evidence gaps across all seven production gates
Read the Client A case study

Fixed-scope service

Agent Production Readiness Assessment

One agent. Seven gates. A documented production decision grounded in the evidence available today.

Fixed fee

$5,000

Five business days from kickoff and receipt of the required artifacts.

50% at scheduling · 50% at delivery

You receive

  • 7-Gate readiness score and production decision
  • Critical blockers and conditional-pass findings
  • Authority, tool and data-access findings
  • Architecture and control assessment
  • Evaluation and observability findings
  • Prioritized remediation backlog with ownership
  • 60-minute technical readout
7Production gates
35+Assessment criteria
100Readiness points

How I work

Senior technical judgment without a platform agenda.

The framework is technology-neutral. The objective is to establish what the agent may do, what the system can prove and what must change before production.

Bounded AI
Separate model judgment from deterministic business rules, protected actions and human approval authority.
Evidence first
Connect every readiness claim to an artifact, test result, control, owner or observable production signal.
Practical output
Translate findings into a prioritized backlog your engineering, product, risk and operations teams can act on.
Written record
Document the system boundary, unresolved risks, decisions and ownership so readiness does not depend on meeting memory.

About

Dawnena Key

I am a Deaf AI and automation engineer, full-stack engineer, data scientist and founder of SonZo AI. My work sits at the intersection of cloud architecture, AgentOps, accessibility and human-centered system design.

I built The 7 Production Gates after repeatedly seeing the same gap: teams had learned how to make AI systems impressive, but had not become equally disciplined about proving they were ready for production.

Assessment findings are advisory and do not constitute a security, legal, regulatory or compliance certification.

Bring one working agent and the production question your team cannot answer clearly.

We’ll use a 30-minute review to establish the likely system boundary, current blockers and whether the full assessment is appropriate.

Email dawnena@sonzo.io