Glossary
Model routing
Sending each request to the cheapest model that handles it adequately.
Most workloads contain a mix: some genuinely needs frontier reasoning, much is classification or extraction a small model does identically well.
Routing also gives you provider failover, which converts an outage from an incident into a routing decision.
The routing rule itself should be boring and inspectable, task type, input length, required capability, rather than a model deciding which model to use. A clever router is an extra failure mode; a simple one is infrastructure.
Routing also gives you a migration path. When a new model arrives, you can send one per cent of traffic to it, compare quality and cost against the incumbent on real workload, and shift the split gradually. Without a routing layer, that evaluation becomes a project rather than a configuration change.
Keep a manual override. When a provider degrades or a model changes behaviour after an update, being able to pin traffic to a known-good option without a deployment is the difference between a configuration change and an incident.
Related terms, in context
The concepts you almost always meet alongside model routing.
- Inference cost optimisation
- Reducing what AI features cost to run, usually 40 to 70% without measurable quality loss.
- AI gateway
- A central proxy for model calls that adds routing, logging, quotas and policy enforcement.
Where this shows up in our work
Model routing is not an abstraction for us. It is a decision we make on live projects. It shows up most directly in llm cost optimisation, enterprise ai platform, where getting it wrong has a cost someone can measure.
If you are evaluating a vendor on this, the useful question is not whether they can define the term. It is what they measure, what they would refuse to do, and what happens in their system when the assumption behind model routing stops holding.
Questions
What is Model routing?
Sending each request to the cheapest model that handles it adequately.
Does Orqent Labs build this?
Yes, LLM Cost Optimisation and Enterprise AI Platform Development. We work across India, covering all 19,238 PIN codes remotely.
Building something that involves model routing?
We will tell you honestly whether it is the right approach for your problem.
Or email bd@dtrasglobal.com · call +91 74118 77878