Inside Spotify's Quiet, Profitable AI Rollout

For most of the last year, the conversation around fine-tuned distillation has been louder than the evidence. That is starting to change.

What Meta FAIR actually shipped with Llama 4 is less a single capability and more a cluster of small, compounding improvements — the kind that only show up when you put a real workflow on top.

Zendesk has been quietly running lead qualification through Zed for months. The results are unglamorous and, for that reason, more interesting than another benchmark chart.

Inside Databricks, the rollout looked less like a moonshot and more like a slow migration. A pilot, a champion, a quiet expansion, a budget line.

Inside Snowflake, the rollout looked less like a moonshot and more like a slow migration. A pilot, a champion, a quiet expansion, a budget line.

The cost curve matters here. GPT-5.1 is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper per token than the equivalent model 18 months ago, and that changes which problems are worth automating at all.

Eval harnesses, once an afterthought, are becoming the most important piece of code in many AI projects. Notion's team treats theirs the way an SRE team treats a runbook.

None of this guarantees a clean story. Alibaba Qwen could ship a model next month that rearranges the assumptions in this piece. But the direction of travel, for now, is clear enough to plan around.