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ADLC: building and operating AI systems

A disciplined lifecycle for AI products — from data, experimentation and evaluation to deployment, monitoring and governance.

ADLC (AI Development Lifecycle) is the specialized lifecycle for building and operating AI/ML systems — different from a traditional SDLC because it revolves around data, probability and drift. A good AI product does not end at “go-live”; it requires continuous evaluation, monitoring and risk governance throughout its life.

Why it matters now
Most GenAI projects stall between PoC and production for lack of a clear lifecycle: no trustworthy evaluation, no control over drift and cost, no risk/compliance governance. ADLC turns AI from a hit-or-miss experiment into a repeatable production capability — especially important as Vietnam’s AI Law 134/2025/QH15 sets accountability and transparency requirements.

A 6-phase lifecycle — AI products

  1. 1

    1 · Problem & data

    Frame the problem by value, collect and govern data, and build the evaluation set.

  2. 2

    2 · Experiment & model

    Choose the approach (prompting, RAG, fine-tune) and experiment with proper tracking.

  3. 3

    3 · Evaluation & red-team

    Automated plus human evals; adversarial testing for safety, bias and hallucination.

  4. 4

    4 · Deployment

    Ship to production with guardrails and version control for models and prompts.

  5. 5

    5 · Monitor & operate

    Track quality, drift and inference cost; alert and respond promptly.

  6. 6

    6 · Govern & improve

    Risk governance, compliance and a feedback loop for continuous improvement.

Areas we go deep on

Each area is a deep content track — articles, reference frameworks and tools added over time.

Read the article series →

The data lifecycle for AI

Collection, labeling, quality control and lineage that feed the model.

RAG, fine-tune or prompting?

A decision framework to choose the approach by problem, data and cost.

Evaluation & red-teaming

Build trustworthy eval suites and adversarial tests for AI systems.

LLMOps/MLOps in production

Deploy, version and automate the operations of AI systems.

Monitoring drift, quality & cost

Detect quality regression, data drift and control inference cost.

Responsible AI governance

Risk, transparency and compliance framework — aligned with AI Law 134/2025.

Outcomes you get

Related topic AI-augmented SDLC: redefining how software is built

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