Control Plane for AI

Borrowed from networking, a control plane is the part of a system that makes decisions, distinct from the data plane that executes them. Applied to AI, the data plane is inference — commoditizing, competitive, priced downward. The control plane is everything determining whether inference is permissible and defensible: which records enter the retrieval surface, which behavioural rules load and in what precedence, which identity is asking, what budget applies, what is retained. Organizations that build only on the data plane find their investment evaporates when the model changes. Those that build a control plane find it survives every model change, because it was never coupled to one.

Centralpoint is a control plane by construction. Governance executes at index time through Data Cleaner and the organization's own dictionary; entitlement is carried by audience and role assignments on each record; behaviour is governed by pre-indexed skills loading in five fixed tiers; consumption is bounded by SkillTokenBudget; and the AI Interaction Log records what each execution assembled. Swapping the model beneath changes none of it.