Company Routes Every AI Request Through One Gateway Service, Which Is Now Its Most Important Employee
The gateway has no manager, no PTO, and a 99.98% attendance record that HR describes as "frankly a little pointed."
CHICAGO — Six months after routing every AI request from every team, tool and assistant through a single internal gateway service, enterprise software company Arden has concluded that the gateway is now the most important entity at the company, ahead of the CEO, the payroll system, and a senior engineer named Walt who knows how the billing job works.
"It holds the keys to every model provider. It decides which model you get. It logs everything. It knows what every team spends," said Lucia Marchetti, the engineer who set it up in an afternoon. "If it goes down, 900 people simultaneously discover they have forgotten how to write a for loop."
The gateway was originally deployed to give the company one place to manage API keys. It now performs retries, region failover, per-team cost tagging, prompt caching, and, according to a recent audit, "at least four things nobody configured."
Executives have begun asking the gateway's dashboard questions they previously asked people. "The CFO wanted to know which team costs the most," Marchetti said. "It was a team called 'default.' Everyone is on 'default.' We are working on it."
The company's org chart does not list the gateway, though an internal joke rendering it as a box labeled "VP of Everything" reporting directly to the board has circulated widely enough that the People team asked for it to be taken down and then requested a copy.
Asked whether a single point of failure concerned her, Marchetti said the company was standing up a second gateway. "It will sit behind the first one," she said. "The first one will route to it. We asked the first one if that was okay. The logs say yes."
At press time, Walt was on vacation, and the gateway was not.