After 8 months of side-by-side production traffic, here is the honest 2026 model-by-use-case breakdown: voice, chat, agents, summarization, code.
We have routed real production traffic across all four model families for eight months. The differences are not what the benchmarks say. Below: the honest 2026 breakdown by use case. What we would do differently next time Looking back at the last six deployments in this category, three things we would do differently: Start the eval harness on day zero. We have always said this and we have always slipped it.
The first time we shipped without a regression eval, we caught a prompt change that silently degraded conversion by 11 percent for two weeks before anyone noticed. Now we treat the eval harness as the first deliverable, before the first prompt. Get the executive sponsor in the first user-acceptance session. Not the project manager, not the ops lead. The owner or the C-suite person whose name is on the budget.
After 8 months of side-by-side production traffic, here is the honest 2026 model-by-use-case breakdown: voice, chat, agents, summarization, code. It is filed under AI Infrastructure because that is where operators looking for this problem actually start, and it is written from production work rather than from a content calendar.