What Support Options Should a Custom AI Development Company in USA Offer After Launch

[RemoteState]

We are about two weeks away from launch and only now realizing we never really nailed down what happens after the project ships.

Our contract with the custom AI development company we hired covers the build phase in detail but the post launch section is basically one vague paragraph about "ongoing support available upon request." That is making me nervous because AI systems are not like regular software, they drift, they need retraining, and things break in ways that are hard to predict until real users start interacting with them.

Since this is our first time working with a custom AI development company in USA we genuinely do not know what a normal post launch support package is supposed to look like. Trying to figure this out before launch day rather than after something goes wrong.

What I Am Learning Support Should Actually Cover
Talked to a few people who have shipped AI products before and started putting together a list of what real custom AI development services support should include:

• Model monitoring for performance drift because AI models degrade over time as real world data shifts away from what they were originally trained on
• A clear SLA for response time when something breaks, especially for anything customer facing where downtime directly affects users
• Scheduled retraining cycles built into the agreement rather than treated as a separate paid request every single time
• A custom AI development company in USA should offer at least basic documentation training so your internal team is not fully dependent on them for every small fix
• Clarity on who owns bug fixes versus new feature requests because these often get bundled together in vague contracts and cause billing disputes later
• Access to logs and monitoring dashboards so you are not blind to what the model is actually doing in production

Where We Stand Now
Going back to our vendor this week to renegotiate the post launch section of our contract before we sign off on anything final. If anyone has a custom AI development company support agreement that actually worked well for them, would really appreciate seeing what that structure looked like so we are not just guessing at what reasonable coverage should be.