Vendor Lock-In
The condition where switching away from a technology provider becomes prohibitively expensive because data, workflows, and pricing sit under the vendor's control.
Vendor Lock-In is the condition where switching away from a technology provider becomes prohibitively expensive because data, workflows, integrations, and pricing all sit under the vendor's control. The vendor's leverage grows with every month of use; the customer's alternatives shrink.
In AI, lock-in compounds faster than in any previous technology cycle. Prompts, fine-tunes, embeddings, evaluation baselines, and the institutional knowledge of how to use the system all accrue to models the enterprise rents. Prices can rise, terms can change, models can be deprecated, and none of it is negotiable, because the switching cost has already been paid in advance by the customer.
The structural alternative is ownership: Private AI running inside Secure Enterprise Boundaries, where the models, the data, and the accumulated intelligence remain assets of the enterprise. That trade-off is the subject of the renting versus owning decision every enterprise now faces.