---
title: "Progressive delivery"
description: "Releasing a change to a small, growing share of real traffic in stages (shadow, pilot, canary, general availability), each with rollback criteria registered before it starts and a tested path back…"
canonical: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/progressive-delivery
author: "Jorge García Aibar"
license: "CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)"
doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197
version: "0.5.0"
updated: 2026-09-25
---

# Progressive delivery

Releasing a change to a small, growing share of real traffic in stages (shadow, pilot, canary, general availability), each with rollback criteria registered before it starts and a tested path back to the previous version, so evidence about live behaviour arrives before full exposure. For AI systems it covers model, prompt, corpus and vendor-version changes alike.

- Developed in: [ch. 15, Progressive delivery as a control](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/governing-deployment#progressive-delivery-as-a-control); [ch. 05, Pattern: Staged Rollout with Rollback Criteria](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/patterns/staged-rollout-rollback-criteria)
- Chapters: [ch. 05, Patterns](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/patterns) · [ch. 14, Development](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/governing-development) · [ch. 15, Deployment](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/governing-deployment) · [ch. 23, AI Agents](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/governing-agents)
- In the glossary chapter: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/glossary#t-progressive-delivery

## Sources

Defined by this Body of Knowledge: the section it is developed in is the source.