What Is AI Middleware?
AI middleware sits between your AI models (LLMs, image models, etc.) and your business applications, providing common infrastructure services: request routing, authentication, response caching, cost tracking, rate limiting, and the ability to switch between models without changing application code.
Why Do Businesses Need AI Middleware?
Without middleware, every application directly calls AI APIs — creating tightly coupled systems that are expensive to monitor, difficult to debug, and impossible to migrate. AI middleware provides a single control plane for all AI usage across your organization: tracking costs, enforcing policies, enabling A/B testing between models, and providing fallback chains when primary models are unavailable.