Case Study: Design Partner Program

Readiness Before GA

"We run policy, observability, and cost tests inside your environment before launch. GA is earned, not assumed."

For regulated enterprises, "General Availability" isn't a marketing date—it's a compliance milestone. Our Design Partner program treats your deployment as a critical infrastructure project.

Support AgentsCustomer Facing
Inference Request
AKIOS Guardrails
PII ScannerActive
Policy GatesShadow Mode
Topic CheckEnforced
Logged & Forwarded
LLM ProviderAzure OpenAI
Audit LogImmutable Storage
REF: FIN-COMPLIANCE
AKIOS ENG

01. The Challenge

A Fortune 500 financial services firm sought to deploy autonomous agents for customer support but faced a strict regulatory blockade. Internal compliance teams flagged three critical risks: unpredictable "hallucinations" advising on financial products, potential PII leakage in prompt contexts, and the inability to reconstruct the "chain of thought" for audit purposes. The project was stalled at the "Proof of Concept" phase for 8 months due to these unmitigated risks, with significant development investment already committed that couldn't proceed to production.

02. The Solution

AKIOS can engage via the Design Partner track to implement a "Guardrails First" architecture. Instead of treating safety as an afterthought, we deploy the AKIOS Control Plane as a middleware layer between the agents and the model providers. This allows us to define deterministic policy gates that intercept every prompt and completion. We establish a "Shadow Mode" deployment where the system processes live traffic but only logs policy violations without blocking, allowing the compliance team to validate the rule set before switching to "Active Blocking" mode.

The engagement can span 12 weeks from initial audit to production deployment, with parallel workstreams for policy development, infrastructure setup, and compliance validation. This compresses what would have been a 6-month internal development cycle into a production-ready solution.

Executive Impact Analysis
Time to Production
12 weeks
Policy Gates
Fully Custom
Deployment
In-VPC
Audit Trail
Tamper-Evident
Cost Savings
Significant
Regulator Sign-off
Facilitated

03Technical Implementation

Core Architecture

  • AKIOS Control Plane middleware layer between agents and model providers
  • Deterministic policy gates intercepting every prompt and completion
  • Shadow Mode deployment for validation before active blocking
  • Model-agnostic design supporting GPT-4, Claude 3, and other providers

Security & Compliance

  • 45+ custom Rego policies for financial advice boundaries
  • Local-first presidio-based PII scrubbing before VPC egress
  • Structured audit logs shipped to Splunk Enterprise
  • Immutable trace IDs linking prompt, policy decision, and output

Performance & Scalability

  • Sub-2ms policy enforcement overhead with zero impact on user experience
  • 450 tokens/second throughput with automatic scaling
  • Semantic caching reducing API calls by 40% for repeated queries
  • 99.7% uptime with cross-region failover capabilities

04Implementation Roadmap

Phase 1: Foundation (Weeks 1-3)

  • Deploy control plane infrastructure within your VPC perimeter
  • Establish baseline monitoring and logging capabilities
  • Configure initial policy framework aligned with your compliance requirements

Phase 2: Integration (Weeks 4-7)

  • Connect existing agent workflows through the control plane
  • Implement data protection and privacy safeguards
  • Set up automated audit trail generation and retention

Phase 3: Validation (Weeks 8-10)

  • Execute comprehensive testing against your regulatory requirements
  • Validate performance impact on existing operations
  • Conduct parallel production simulation with compliance oversight

Phase 4: Production (Weeks 11-12)

  • Graduated rollout with full compliance monitoring active
  • Establish ongoing governance and policy management processes
  • Enable continuous improvement through automated feedback loops

Ready to build?

Start your own Design Partner Program today and see the difference.