When an AI solution is described as “not scalable due to high maintenance requirements,” PMI-style AI governance and lifecycle guidance points toward architectural refactoring rather than simply changing technologies or deployment environments. High maintenance often stems from tight coupling, monolithic design, and lack of clear separation between data, model, business logic, and interface layers.

Adopting a modular architecture to isolate different system components (option C) directly addresses this problem. In a modular or microservice-oriented design, each component—data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, model serving, monitoring, etc.—is separated behind clear interfaces. This makes it much easier to update or replace one part of the system without impacting the whole, which reduces maintenance overhead and improves scalability over time. It also supports independent deployment, targeted testing, and selective scaling of the components that receive the heaviest load.

Switching to a rule-based system (option A) typically increases maintenance complexity in dynamic environments. Incorporating generative AI (option B) may change the modeling approach but does not inherently solve structural maintenance issues. Utilizing cloud-based solutions (option D) helps with infrastructure scalability but does not fix architectural coupling. Therefore, the most effective way to address non-scalability caused by high maintenance requirements is to adopt a modular architecture.