AI Vendor Lock-in Trap: How to Avoid Getting Stuck with Expensive Solutions
Your company just signed a multi-year contract with a major AI platform vendor. The pilot looked promising — inference was fast, the APIs were clean, the support team was responsive, and leadership was impressed. Eighteen months later, you have two hundred internal tools that directly call that vendor's proprietary API, your data pipeline outputs a format that only their platform ingests cleanly, your ML team has built every evaluation workflow around their SDK, and the vendor just announced a 40% price increase on inference for enterprise tiers. You want to switch. You cannot. That is the AI vendor lock-in trap, and it is already swallowing organizations at a scale that most decision-makers do not realize until the migration quote lands on their desk. This post is not going to give you the generic advice of "read contracts carefully" or "evaluate multiple vendors before signing." You have already heard that. Instead, this post is going to walk through the act...
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