AI Observability Race Will Be Won on Interoperability
The New Stack, Monday, October 26th, 2026
AI observability will be won on interoperability, with OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions enabling cost-per-outcome comparison across models.
This sponsored piece argues that leaders should judge AI by reliable outcomes at the right cost and risk, not by model quality, speed or token price alone.
OpenTelemetry's GenAI semantic conventions reduce duplicate integration work and make models and providers easier to compare without forcing identical storage.
It recommends measuring cost per outcome rather than cost per token, since a cheaper model that needs more retries can cost more.
It points to Splunk's Agent Observability, built on OpenTelemetry and AGNTCY standards, and the open-source Observability Studio for validating telemetry against conventions before production.