Scalability is how well an AI system handles growing volumes of work. A system that works reliably for 100 requests per day needs to be designed differently if it will handle 100,000 under peak conditions.
Scalability depends on infrastructure design, model serving architecture, retrieval pipeline efficiency, and compute resource management. Customer-facing systems and high-volume document processors face the most demanding scalability requirements — particularly during peak periods when demand can spike unpredictably.
