How to Evaluate an AI Platform as a Service

AI PaaS can reduce the infrastructure burden of building AI products, but similar feature labels can hide major differences in control, portability, security, and integration effort. The article compares platforms across model access, retrieval, agent orchestration, evaluation, and governance, then proposes eight selection criteria covering data readiness, stack compatibility, customization, regional availability, portability, and compliance. Technology leaders should evaluate the control plane around models—not just model choice—because retrieval pipelines, agent runtimes, guardrails, identity bindings, and evaluation assets can create the hardest dependencies to replace.