As LLM usage grows beyond a single team or model, a simple SDK wrapper quickly becomes insufficient. An AI Gateway sits between your app and model providers, offering centralized routing, cost tracking, compliance guardrails, and observability that a traditional API Gateway cannot provide. The post outlines when you don't need one (single team, simple use case, small spend) versus when you do (multiple teams, multiple providers, compliance requirements, unclear costs). It describes what a production AI Gateway looks like in practice, including fallback routing, per-team governance, and request-level tracing, before promoting TrueFoundry as a specific solution.