Step 5: Maintenance under Operational Conditions
Deploying Trustworthy AI for Industrial Maintenance

Passing through Gate W2 authorizes the system’s deployment into production. Step 5 begins on the day the system becomes accessible to all operators within the ODD scope. It does not end; rather, it structures the system’s operational lifecycle until its eventual decommissioning.

The temptation at this stage is to consider the project delivered and move on to the next one. Experience shows that it is precisely at this point that AI systems degrade if no one monitors them. A document index that is no longer updated, a model whose behavior drifts after a software update, an abstention threshold that no longer reflects the reality of the corpus: these are all factors contributing to silent degradation that only structured operation can prevent.