Those of us who lived through the SaaS era carry scar tissue about lock-in. Data hostage in proprietary formats, integrations wired so deep that leaving costs more than staying, renewal negotiations conducted from a position of engineered weakness. We learned, expensively.
I want to flag that it’s happening again, and the new version is more subtle and more binding.
AI lock-in won’t primarily be about data formats. It’s being built from softer materials. Context: the platform that has ingested your documents, your processes, your organisational vocabulary becomes remarkably hard to walk away from, because a rival starts ignorant. Memory: every interaction teaches the incumbent more about your people and their work, an asset that compounds daily and transfers nowhere. Workflow embedding: agents wired into your operations, prompts and automations accumulated by thousands of small acts of staff ingenuity, none of it portable. And skills: your workforce fluent in one ecosystem’s way of working, a retraining bill masquerading as a preference.
Notice what’s different from SaaS lock-in. Much of this moat is built from your own material, your data, your usage, your people’s learning, deposited continuously into someone else’s asset. The switching cost isn’t imposed at contract time. It accrues silently, per day, per prompt.
I’m not counselling avoidance; the value is real and waiting is its own risk. I’m counselling eyes open. Practically, that means asking now, while you have leverage: what leaves with us if we leave? Can accumulated context and memory be exported in usable form? Are our prompts, agent designs and automations documented outside the platform, or do they exist only inside it? Where can we keep the interface layer, the place our people and processes touch AI, abstracted enough that the model behind it can change? And are we ever building deep skills in a proprietary layer when an equivalent open pattern exists?
None of these questions cost much today. All of them are expensive to ask for the first time at renewal, across the table from a vendor who knows precisely how much of your organisation now lives inside their product.