Every team that moves an AI model from experimentation to production hits the same wall. The model works. The serving stack works. Then someone asks how the continuous integration (CI) pipeline is going to authenticate, and the room gets quiet.What happens next is predictable. A developer's personal token gets copied into a secret. Or a service account gets created with more access than anyone intended, shared across pipelines, and forgotten. The traffic flows. Nobody knows whose budget it counts against. When that developer moves teams 6 months later, the credential lives on in places nobody