Evaluation and deployment spans the full model spectrum - proprietary frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), open-weight models (Llama 3.1, Mistral, Phi-3, Qwen), and domain-specific models (BioMedLM, FinBERT-derived architectures, Code Llama). Model selection is driven by a structured evaluation matrix covering task performance, context window requirements, total cost of ownership, data residency constraints, and latency SLAs.