SC-AI-020 · Model lifecycle

Performance monitoring and drift detection

Medium effortCovered by ISO 27001: StrongSatisfies 21 obligations in 9 policies

What it means

  • Once live, keep watching whether the AI still works as tested. Models degrade as customers, markets and data change.
  • Track: accuracy or error rates, input data drift, output distribution shifts, fairness metrics, hallucination or complaint rates for GenAI, override rates by human reviewers, latency and availability.
  • Set alert thresholds and a response: investigate, retrain, fall back to manual or rules, or switch off.
  • Include periodic sample checks of AI decisions by humans to catch silent degradation.

Why it matters

  • RBI FREE-AI expects monitoring for drift, degradation, bias and unexplained behaviour, with defined fallbacks, and sample human checks as part of AI BCP.
  • A model approved last year may be quietly wrong today; without monitoring nobody notices until complaints arrive.
  • ICMR, NITI Aayog and Tamil Nadu guidance all call for ongoing monitoring or periodic re-scoring.

Checklist

  1. Define monitoring metrics and thresholds per system, based on the acceptance criteria from SC-AI-015 Pre-deployment testing and validation.
  2. Set up dashboards and automated alerts routed to the system owner.
  3. Monitor input drift and output drift, not just accuracy (labels often arrive late).
  4. Track human override rates and complaint volumes linked to AI.
  5. Run monthly or quarterly sample reviews of AI decisions by a human.
  6. Write a playbook for each alert: who investigates, when to retrain, when to fall back or switch off.
  7. Report monitoring results to the AI committee at a set frequency; re-score self-learning systems at least every six months.

Evidence examples

  • Monitoring dashboard screenshot for the fraud model with drift and accuracy thresholds.
  • Alert history and linked investigation tickets.
  • Monthly sample review log of 50 AI decisions checked by a credit officer.
  • Quarterly model performance report to the AI committee.
  • Fallback playbook and a record of it being used.

Common pitfalls

  • Monitoring only uptime and latency, not decision quality.
  • Alerts going to a shared inbox nobody reads.
  • No threshold for "switch off", so a bad model runs for weeks.
  • Ignoring vendor model changes that show up as sudden output shifts.

Satisfies

Also relevant to

Standards crosswalk

Clause references only. Check the standard itself for the exact wording.

ISO/IEC 42001

  • 9.1 Monitoring, measurement, analysis and evaluation
  • A.6.2.6 AI system operation and monitoring
  • A.6.2.8 AI system recording of event logs

ISO/IEC 27001

  • A.8.6 Capacity management
  • A.8.15 Logging
  • A.8.16 Monitoring activities

SOC 2

  • CC4.1
  • CC7.2
  • PI1.4

Key takeaways

  • Watch decision quality, drift and fairness in production, with thresholds and a playbook.
  • Partial reuse from ISO 27001: logging and monitoring tooling and processes (A.8.15, A.8.16) carry over; model performance and drift metrics are new.
  • Add human sample checks to catch silent degradation.

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