Most AI features don't fail in the model. They fail at the gate. Someone demos a shiny prompt. Leadership loves it. It ships. Then a customer pastes something weird, an agent calls the wrong tool, or a "helpful" answer invents an offer that never existed. The postmortem is always the same: we optimized for the demo, not for production. I call the missing step Ship Gate — a short, boring checklist you run before any AI feature leaves the sandbox. Not a 40-page risk memo. A gate you can...