Series: AI Isn’t an Engineering Problem Anymore (Part 7) It’s a cost problem—and most teams don’t realize it yet. What is a Control Plane? Imagine a world with hundreds of thousands of planes in the sky, but no airports, no central communication systems, and no coordination for routing, landing, or takeoff scheduling. Sounds chaotic, right? Air traffic control acts as a control plane. The planes do the actual work, but the control systems coordinate: routing scheduling communication and safety Now let’s refocus back to AI. Most AI products today are surprisingly simple underneath. At their core, many of them are essentially: User input → LLM API call → Response At a small scale, this works perfectly fine. But as AI adoption grows, raw API calls alone stop being enough.…