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The enterprise technology industry has a peculiar relationship with accountability. When it comes to cloud uptime, latency, and data security, we expect contractual guarantees, SLAs, and clearly defined remedies. But when it comes to AI-generated outputs, the actual content these systems produce, we've quietly accepted a different standard: best effort.

I've spent years in commercial and operational roles at companies like Gap, Amazon, and Door Dash / Wolt. In every one of those environments, product visuals weren't a marketing nice-to-have. They were infrastructure. A wrong color on a listing didn't just look bad; it drove returns. A missing ingredient on a food image wasn't an aesthetic issue; it was a trust issue that compounded at scale and was dangerous to our customers .

So when AI-generated images started entering enterprise workflows in earnest, I watched with real interest. The efficiency gains were compelling: the ability to generate, retouch, and adapt product visuals at a speed and scale that traditional studio workflows simply cannot match.

But something fundamental was missing from the enterprise conversation: accountability for outputs.

The gap between impressive and dependable

There's a difference between AI that produces impressive results in demos and AI tools you can stake commercial operations on. For enterprise buyers, that gap matters enormously.

Consider what happens when am AI-generated product image fails at volume. A wrong product color in a hero image doesn't trigger one return; it triggers thousands. A distorted shape on a fashion listing doesn't affect one conversion; it affects an entire category. The commercial exposure from visual inaccuracy compounds at scale in a way that individual errors simply don't.

Yet for most of the AI visual tools currently available to enterprise buyers, the contractual position on this exposure is essentially zero. You buy credits, you run images, and what comes out is what you get. If the output doesn't match the brief, you absorb the cost: in regeneration time, in quality control overhead, and ultimately in the downstream commercial impact of content that doesn't perform.

This isn't an indictment of the technology. AI-generated images have genuinely transformed what's operationally possible for enterprise visual production. But the commercial model hasn't kept up with the commercial reality.

Why ownership changes everything

The reason most AI visual vendors can't offer meaningful output guarantees isn't reluctance; it's architecture. If you're building on third-party foundation models, you have no ability to evaluate, course-correct, or stand behind the quality of what those models produce at the output level. The accountability stops at the API.

The vendors who can make guarantees are the ones who own the full stack: the generation models, the evaluation models, and the remediation process. This is the structural distinction that makes contractual guarantees viable, not as a commercial gesture, but as something that can actually be operationalized.

When a proprietary fidelity evaluation model is running on every output before delivery, you have a mechanism for identifying failures before the client does. When you own the rater, the fixer, and the generation pipeline, you have the ability to correct those failures.

When you've run a feasibility check on a customer's actual catalogue before any commercial commitment, you know what the pass rate will look like in production.

That's the architecture that makes a guarantee meaningful: not a promise, but an auditable process with contractual teeth.

What contractual accountability looks like in practice

The mechanics matter here, because "guarantee" can mean many things. In practice, an enterprise visual guarantee should do three things: define pass/fail criteria upfront based on the customer's actual brief; evaluate every output against those criteria before delivery; and trigger a clear remedy, regeneration or credit refund, when failures occur.

Critically, the criteria need to be specific. Product fidelity failures, an altered color, a missing ingredient, a distorted product shape, are measurable and contractually defensible. Subjective aesthetic preferences, a lighting angle, a background tone, are not. The boundary between these two things is where a real guarantee lives, and where vague commitments fall apart.

For enterprise buyers, this specificity is valuable in itself. It forces the conversation about what "quality" actually means for a given catalogue before procurement, rather than after. That clarity typically improves outcomes on both sides.

The accountability moment for enterprise AI

We're at a point in the enterprise AI cycle where the conversation needs to shift from what these systems can do to what vendors are willing to stand behind. Capability is no longer the differentiator; the market is full of capable tools. Dependability is.

For enterprise procurement teams, this means starting to ask harder questions. Not just "what's your accuracy rate?" but "what happens when it's wrong, and what are the contractual terms?" Not just "can you handle our volume?" but "what remedies apply when you don't meet the standard we've agreed?"

For the vendor community, it means recognising that the era of best-effort AI in enterprise contexts is ending. Buyers who are running tens of thousands of product images through AI pipelines need the same accountability from those systems that they expect from any other mission-critical infrastructure.

The goal in commerce was never the most beautiful image. It was always an image that sells, reliably, accurately, at scale. Enterprise AI that can guarantee that outcome is the next competitive frontier. The vendors willing to back their outputs contractually are the ones that will earn a place in enterprise infrastructure for the long term.

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The first time I read the Odyssey , I was sixteen years old. The fantastical creatures, the alien cultures, and the wily hero’s desperate search for home were all thrilling to me. I felt an uncanny familiarity: with the characters, yes, but also with the way the story was told, and what it seemed to be about. Although I didn’t know it at the time, many of my favorite books were modeled on Homer’s tale. I’ve read the Odyssey many times since then, and I learn something new—about the world, about myself—every time. Now that I am nearly the age Odysseus was when he returned to Ithaca, I realize the gravitational pull of this story has been the idea of nostos , the ancient Greek concept of homecoming.

I’m not really from a place, like Odysseus is. He’s the son of a king who is the son of a king who is the son of a king and so on of a small and stubborn island in the Ionian Sea. He can claim one home, and yearn for it exclusively. I had lived in a dozen places by the time I was an adult. One thing I know is that you can find allegorical Lotus Eaters and Sirens and Phaeacians and Cyclops in all kinds of places.

As I traveled from place to place, I too was searching for clues about how to live, how to be a fully realized person, everywhere I went. I was searching for my own idea of home.

The first book I ever loved was the D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths . These stories anchored themselves into my understanding of what a story is—beauty and danger pressing in on all sides, bad behavior and heroics, the drive to make meaning out of the unmitigated chaos of human existence. This all made sense to my young brain. I’d had a chaotic childhood up until then; we had lived in a commune, a van, a tent, an abandoned barracks, on a friend’s living room floor and in my grandparent’s basement. It seemed that there was outrageous beauty and a looming threat around every corner. I’d received this book as a gift when I was about four years old. My mother and I were living in a commune of artists—my father was a poet who was always coming and going from our lives—when their friend Michael presented me with the book. There, on the first page, a picture of Cronus shoving a baby into his mouth. In the drawing, there are five little-kid faces crowded together in his stomach. The facing page depicts a mother, fearful, sneaking away to protect her new child.

Not long after he gave me the book, Michael entered the bedroom where my mother and my father and I all slept. He slipped in with a machete in his hand. When he brought it down in one swinging arc, my father rolled out of the way, pulling us off the bed with him. Michael hacked the bed to pieces while we cowered in the corner. Then he ran out of the building. Everyone said he was having a bad trip. Once I learned to read, those illustrations took on more meaning, the stories started to take form, to become about something beyond my own experience, but the terror and the fascination of the pictures remained.

I’ve continued to read Greek Myths, in various forms, since then, but I first read Homer’s Odyssey in high school, using the Fitzgerald translation. I have a theory that most people will remain loyal to the first Odyssey translation they read. I will always compare other renderings to the Fitzgerald. My friend Sylvie is partial to the Lattimore—like me she first read it as a teenager and so even as new and wonderful translations make their way into the world (Emily Wilson’s, Daniel Mendelsohn’s), we remain most comfortable with our first love. At sixteen, much of the poem went over my head, but I was truly moved by the adolescent anger and confusion of Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. By then I hadn’t seen my biological father in more than a decade. Anytime we ran into someone who knew him, this is what they said: “I’m friends with your father, you know. He is a brilliant, misunderstood genius. He’s a mystic. He’s special. He should be famous. I met him on the astral plane last week.” When Telemachus runs into anyone who knew his father, this is what they say: “As to stratagems, no man would claim Odysseus’ gift for those. He had no rivals, your father, at the tricks of war…The son is rare who measures with his father, and one in a thousand is a better man.”

I re-read the Odyssey again in my twenties, the Fagles translation. This time around, I was fascinated by Odysseus’ adventures. I spent much of that time traveling abroad—Central and South America, Spain, Morocco, London. As Odysseus wanders from place to place, discovering the foreign customs and attitudes of each one, the story explores the concept of home, asking what kind of civilization is appropriate for an authentic human being. If the Iliad is a story about war, about seeking glory in death, about making death meaningful, the Odyssey , then, is a story about life, about survival, about making life meaningful. I wanted a meaningful life, too. As I traveled from place to place, I too was searching for clues about how to live, how to be a fully realized person, everywhere I went. I was searching for my own idea of home.

This for me, has become the true meaning of nostos , homecoming—it is a restoration of humanity, community and relationship after enduring hardship.

Once I became a wife and a mother, it was Penelope’s struggle that gripped me. That’s when I read Emily Wilson’s translation. Her extraordinary introduction alone is worth the price of the book: “The poem meditates on what women might be capable of, and the degree to which their potential can or should be suppressed.” Penelope’s story is asking the same questions I was at that time: What makes a good marriage? In ancient Greek the word is homophrosyne —a kind of like-mindedness. Penelope is Odysseus’ equal, in cunning, in stubbornness, in wiles. How do you navigate your partner’s pathos, deception, wrong-headedness? How do you navigate your own? And how do you parent a growing son (especially once he is taller than you)? Here is Wilson’s stark translation of Telemachus’ famous insolence: “It is for men to talk, especially me. I am the master. That startled her.” I saw Penelope’s doubt, and her conviction, and the trouble that tension caused for her.

Reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s elegant new translation this past year, firmly in my middle years, I am fascinated by what it takes to reintegrate with your people, to show up, to finally drop the lies and masks and tricks, and to be seen, truly, for who you are. Odysseus has to do that for his son, for his father, for his people, and in the end, for Penelope, or she will not accept him into her home. In Mendelsohn’s translation, Penelope’s reservations, and discernment are palpable: “But if indeed it is true that he’s Odysseus and has come home, then the two of us will be able to recognize each other with more confidence, for we have signs that we two know, kept secret from other people.” When he throws off the beggar’s disguise and enacts his revenge, it is barbaric. It is horrifying. I want to look away, every time. In the end, Penelope is the one with the power to recognize him, or not. This for me, has become the true meaning of nostos , homecoming—it is a restoration of humanity, community and relationship after enduring hardship.

My novel, The Shared Life of Egan and Lucian , is set on an island off the coast of Maine. It’s the story of identical twin brothers. One of them leaves, and one of them stays, as so often happens. In the end, there is a homecoming; in this case, one that feels too late. Writing about a family living their life on an island, I couldn’t help but think of the Odyssey : returning home after a long absence, fathers and sons, mothers and sons, long marriages, craftsmanship in art and sport, the way the natural world shapes a person’s experience. In my novel, I gave that obsession to the character of Ian, Egan and Lucian’s father. Every day Ian checks the tide gauge at the eastern end of his island home, measuring and charting the rising sea levels. He also spends time each day working at their kitchen table, slowly and painstakingly writing his own book about the Odyssey . He’s trying to make out how the two are related in his mind. Warming seas and suitors feasting in the hall. Furious storms then and furious storms now. The Odyssey is as relevant as ever it was. And I, for one, cannot wait for the next rendition of this story.

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The Shared Life of Egan and Lucian by Rose Smith is available from Hawthorne Books.