A slow AI workflow is not necessarily waiting for a slow model. The delay may be elsewhere in the request's journey.

Carry one shared request identity through intake, queueing, model calls, integrations, human review, and external confirmation.

Record meaningful stages and durations with enough safe context to connect them, rather than collecting unrelated technical messages.

Show staff a truthful timeline and separate human waiting from compute time. Use the same request reference when support investigates an incident.

Improve the bottleneck you actually observe. Faster inference will not resolve a request that is still waiting for a reviewer, a connector, or confirmation from another system.

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